For your reading pleasure, please enjoy our interview with screenwriter Jeff Loveness about writing Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania from Backstory Magazine’s issue 48 – now available to read! If you enjoy what you’ve read, we hope you’ll join us to read the rest of the issue by subscribing to Backstory Magazine!
Jeff Loveness on writing the MCU’s new big bad and how a call out of the blue led him to becoming Marve’s new go-to screenwriter
By Danny Munso
Jeff Loveness only had a few hours to prepare for the biggest meeting of his career. “I got one of those random, cliché Hollywood calls,” he laughs. “My manager said, ‘Hey, can you get to Marvel at 3 o’clock?’ ” Given no other information, he arrived to find Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, Ant-Man franchise director Peyton Reed and several others waiting for him. Loveness had just left his gig as a writer and supervising producer on Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty—for which he won an Emmy in 2020 and a nomination in 2022—and was now being asked to give his take on not only a third Ant-Man film but one that would introduce the new great villain for the next few phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Reed had previously expressed to Feige that they shouldn’t make another Ant-Man film unless it would be a significant entrant in the MCU, which the first two films—despite their considerable charm and success—were not. “Basically, they knew they wanted a movie very tonally different from the first two, and they wanted to use Kang the Conqueror and really explore the Quantum Realm. That was basically it. Marvel is kind of cool. They give you a few action figures and go, What is the best story you can do with all these? I got to bring a lot to the table.”
Loveness grew up reading Marvel and has penned issues for both Marvel and DC, and he summoned that knowledge to impress those in the room, particularly when it came to his opinions on Kang. “Thank God I knew a little bit about him,” Loveness says. “I was a huge X-Men guy growing up, but I knew Kang in a general sense because he’s got mythos in the X-Men world as well. I wasn’t a die-hard Avengers fan, but the cool thing about Kang is he really touches a lot of different worlds in the comics. There was a run by [animator-writer] Rick Remender on Uncanny Avengers, which I thought was a really impressive use of [the character]. He’s up there with Ultron and Doom and Loki as those top Avengers villains. I realized I had a chance to write a classic supervillain that isn’t actually making jokes or doing quips. He means what he says.” Loveness brought up something about Kang that he thinks led to getting him the job. Kang specializes in time travel and Loveness thought that was the key to linking him to the hero of Ant-Man, Scott Lang, who in previous events in the MCU films, lost years of his life to being trapped in the Quantum Realm. “No one has lost more time in the MCU than Scott Lang. I found that to be an unlikely connection between those two guys. I thought you could have this Faustian bargain, with Kang the Conqueror offering to give the Everyman of the MCU half his life back if he wants it.”
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania begins with Scott (Paul Rudd) having just released an autobiography, living happily with girlfriend Hope (Evangeline Lilly) and in semi-retirement from being a superhero. This irritates his teenage daughter Cassie (Kathryn Newton), who has become a political activist and wants her father to use his powers to help their community. At a family dinner, Cassie reveals she and Hank (Michael Douglas) have been working on a device that can contact the Quantum Realm. Horrified, Janet (Michelle Pfeiffer) tries to shut it down, but it’s too late. A portal opens up, sucking them all into the realm. When Janet was stuck there for years before being rescued by Hank in Ant-Man and the Wasp, she befriended Kang (Jonathan Majors), a fellow lost traveler also trying to get home. After the pair configure a way out, Janet discovers who Kang truly is—an exiled villain who has destroyed worlds and timelines of the multiverse. She figures out a way to strand him there, but now thanks to Cassie’s device, he summons them all to the Quantum Realm, where he has built an empire to dismantle what Janet did and help him finally escape.
Kang as a character can be tough to wrap your head around. He is not one person but many, appearing across the multiverse as different variants of himself that are often working with one another. Audiences first briefly met a docile variant of Kang in the final episode of 2021’s Loki, where he appeared as He Who Remains before dying. We meet Kang the Conqueror in Quantumania along with some of his more famous variants from the comics in two post-credit scenes. These will directly lead to a larger presence for Kang throughout Phases 5 and 6 of the MCU. And this is especially relevant to Loveness, who has also been tapped to pen the penultimate film of Phase 6, 2025’s ominously titled Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. It’s why Quantumania is such a crucial film not just for the character but for the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe, and it was up to Loveness to truly introduce him to audiences.
One of the first big ideas the writer had was the connection between Kang and Janet, a friendship that not only tethered Kang to the world of Ant-Man and its previous film but helped to make a God-like character more accessible. “I thought giving him this shipwrecked comrade and showing this broken friendship with Janet really humanized the character,” Loveness says. “I wanted to introduce him before he gets apocalyptic in these Avenger movies. I thought it would be cool to show him in a vulnerable place and to show the loneliness of that character—and really just leave breadcrumbs to his further ambitions. There’s going to be plenty of that stuff in the Avenger movies, so I wanted to strip him down and leave the time stuff for later, leave all the big Phase 5 plot mechanics for later and really get to know this guy.”
Not every question about Kang is answered in Quantumania, and that was intentional on Loveness’ part. For example, though we know Kang the Conqueror was exiled to the Quantum Realm, we don’t find out until the post-credits scenes it was his own variants that did the exiling, and the exact reasons for it aren’t clear. “Instead of showing the rise of a supervillain, I thought, What if we caught him at the tail end of something bad that happened?” the writer says. “There’s a whole backstory we don’t know yet except for little hints. I always like Marvel lore or things like Lord of the Rings or Game of Thrones—when you jump into the story, there’s like four books that have already happened that we don’t know about. I don’t want to spoil too much, but we’re going to breadcrumb that stuff and pay it off in Avengers.” It was also important to Loveness that Kang the Conqueror—despite his name and pedigree—lose at the end of the film. “I wanted to lean into the fact that he has the Conqueror in his name. He’s like a historical figure that doesn’t exist anymore like Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan. All those guys, they had a vision and were willing to break the world in front of them because they believed so strongly in something. Those type of guys are known for their defeats as much as their victories, and that’s something I love about Kang as well.”
Kang has taken up a lot of promotional energy around this film, perhaps justifiably so. But the emotional spine of the movie is the relationship between Scott and Cassie. In the first two Ant-Man films, Cassie was a young child (played by Abby Ryder Fortson) who worshipped her dad. Though they’re still close in Quantumania, there is now more tension between the two. Cassie thinks her dad needs to be helping more rather than doing book readings and signings. Scott, meanwhile, is upset Cassie keeps getting in trouble while trying to do the right thing. Her first scene in Quantumania is Scott and Hope bailing her out of jail after she’s arrested protesting the removal of a homeless camp in San Francisco, where she also used Hank’s tech to shrink a cop car. “I don’t think I know a single parent with teenage kids who are respected by their kids,” Loveness says. “I wanted to explore something like Rocky III—where what happens after you win? Are you coasting? Are you afraid of losing a little bit more? Are you playing it safe? The reason Cassie is doing what she’s doing is because of her dad. There is admiration and respect but it comes out of a place of hostility, where you think your dad is coasting while you’re on the front lines shrinking cop cars and trying to prevent homeless sweeps.”
Cassie’s ground-level hero work isn’t a heavy focus in Loveness’ script, but it is a plot point that’s important to him. With so many real-life issues we have to deal with on a daily basis, it’s possible that superheroes teaming up to stop giant attacks like the one on New York in Avengers or the final battle in Avengers: Endgame can lose their impact. “Without being too on the nose, I wanted to show a bit of that generation divide, because the world is a pretty messed up place and preventing a big apocalyptic event doesn’t seem like enough anymore. The real world has enough problems. With all of these young Avengers [introduced in the MCU], it’s a good opportunity to show these more societal problems going on and that maybe there’s another way to be a superhero.”
One idea that goes back to that day-one meeting is the inclusion of M.O.D.O.K. in the story. The character—whose name stands for Mobile Organism Designed Only for Killing—dates back to the ’60s and even had an animated series on Hulu in 2021 helmed by Jordan Blum. But producer Stephen Broussard had a different idea for bringing M.O.D.O.K. into the MCU, suggesting instead that the character take the form of Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), the villain Scott inadvertently sent to the Quantum Realm in the climax of the first Ant-Man. The combination of M.O.D.O.K.’s unique design—essentially a giant, floating head with weapons—and Darren’s insecure bitterness toward Scott makes for some of the funnier moments in Quantumania. “Once [Broussard] mentioned that idea, I just ran with it,” Loveness says. “Scott Lang compared to Darren Cross has the perfect life. He hasn’t seen this guy in eight years, and he’s an Avenger. He literally saved the world. He’s dating the woman you were in love with. He’s got the respect of Hank Pym. All this stuff has happened, and you’re just a big floating head with baby legs. He’s clearly a guy who’s insecure but also very good at killing people, so you have to watch out for him. The Jordan Blum show did such a great comics-faithful adaptation of M.O.D.O.K., so having our own original spin gave us a fresh angle on the character.” During the final battle in the film, Cassie appeals to Darren’s better side and gets him to join the fight against Kang. This leads to Darren dying a noble death, a scene Loveness was delighted to include. “Getting to do this sort of Sean Bean-as-Boromir [from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring] epic death scene for a character who is an asshole and really doesn’t deserve it was the highlight of the movie for me as a comedy writer.”
But it’s another scene that stands out to him as both the most difficult and rewarding of the writing process. During an extended flashback showing Janet and Kang’s friendship and efforts to find a way to get each other out of the Quantum Realm, Janet confesses that she is missing so much of her daughter Hope’s life and she thought she would have more time with her. “She’s given into despair, and then there’s a pause and you see Kang slowly open up and tell her, ‘I can give that back to you,’ ” Loveness says. “It’s almost Christ-like. This is the first person in thousands of years who doesn’t know who he is, is not terrified of him and isn’t trying to kill him. It’s a beautiful moment.” In the scene, Kang tells Janet that if they get his vessel up and running, he can make it so it’s like Janet never left Hope and Hank at all. But it took draft after draft to get that monologue just right.
Loveness worked heavily in conjunction with Majors to find the right words to best show the audience just how the character thinks. “I wrote that scene a lot, and Jonathan is such an incredible and passionate actor in a great way. He and I would go back and forth and ask, ‘What is he actually trying to say? Why is he opening up here? What is he trying to say about time?’ ” Then during a break in preproduction, the writer found himself on a train from Edinburgh to London when the perfect line finally came to him. In the scene, Kang says to Janet, “[Time] isn’t what you think it is. It’s a cage. It does everything it can to break you.” Loveness quickly wrote what ended up being the final version of that scene. “I showed it to Jonathan, and you could see him light up: Yes, that’s it. He jumped in and did a phenomenal job with it. It really got into the whole soft and almost lonely core of Kang before he does all that Conqueror stuff we’ll soon see over the next phase. That, to me, was the most creatively fulfilling moment of the whole movie.”
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