It’s said that size doesn’t matter, but that’s not the ethos of Marvel’s Ant-Man films.
Beginning with 2015’s self-titled debut and through 2018’s Ant-Man and the Wasp, director Payton Reed’s Marvel movies function as palate cleansers between Avengers installments (the 2015 debut followed Avengers: Age of Ultron, while Wasp came after the snappy ending of Infinity War). In short, Ant-Man means a small-stakes—that is engagingly fun and funny—trip to the movies, not bogged down by the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe machine.
That’s not the case with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which kicks off the MCU’s staggering Phase 5 and begins the overarching Multiversal Saga storyline in full effect. What was once light fare is now responsible for introducing the next Thanos-level threat to MCU moviegoers and closing out the Ant-Man trilogy—a sentence I never thought I would type when the first film hit in 2015—in a satisfying way.