I’ll preface everything I’m about to write with the fact that I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Marvel Comics fan. I hoarded the trading cards in the early ‘90s, I pretty much quit Little League Baseball because it conflicted with new episodes of Spider-Man: The Animated Series on Saturday mornings, and my office bookshelves are lined with Hasbro Marvel Legends, Funko POP! Spideys, graded first appearances and more trade paperbacks than I’ll ever have time to read. We’re living in an era in which the anticipation between Marvel Cinematic Universe Disney+ series and theatrical releases is near-nonexistent. Heck, you just might need the Time Stone to stay caught up on everything these days! Amirite?!
The cinematic spinner rack is positively brimming with
content, which is great. After all, no one’s holding a repulsor glove to your head
and forcing you to watch it all. But I ask you: When was the last time you were
really, truly excited about an upcoming Marvel Studios movie? When was the last
time you had the chance to be really, truly excited about an upcoming
Marvel Studios movie? That might be hard to answer.
The latest phase of the MCU has been largely about
rebuilding and setting the stage for the future. New heroes, new villains, new
conflicts, new realities. There have been crowd-pleasers (Spider-Man: No Way
Home), surprise hits (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings), surprise
misses (Eternals), tonal rollercoasters (Thor: Love and Thunder),
underrated series (Hawkeye, Loki), slow burns (Moon Knight),
fourth-wall breaks (She-Hulk: Attorney at Law), and emotional farewells (Black
Panther: Wakanda Forever). We even got bizarre special presentations like Werewolf
by Night and The Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special. CONTENT!
SO! MUCH! CONTENT!
People can debate about the quality of each and every one of
those projects – hell, that’s half the fun of being a comic book fan – but I
think we can all agree that Marvel Studios’ aggressive output makes it harder
to build up anticipation for any individual project (and before anyone calls me
out, Star Wars is also guilty of content hyperdrive as of late). This Marvel
malaise is compounded by the general feeling that this absolute glut of new shows
and films are not – at least on the surface – leading up to the next big
threat. With Thanos out of the picture, it feels like the story campaign of the
MCU’s figurative video game is over and we’re just playing the side quests and
multiversal DLC.
But that is seemingly all changing with the high-stakes Ant-Man
and the Wasp: Quantumania – releasing nearly three months after Marvel
Studios’ most recent project, the aforementioned Guardians of the Galaxy Holiday Special, which feels like the biggest release gap
we’ve had in a while. A new trailer for the third Ant-Man film dropped Monday
night, giving us more of a glimpse at Jonathan Majors’ menacing Kang – the next
big bad of the MCU (you previously saw him as a version of this character in
Loki). Will Paul Rudd’s insectoid Avenger make it out alive in this one,
or will he be squashed beneath Kang’s boot? We’ll find out February 17.
Watch the trailer below!