At the end of Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, Kang the Conqueror is kicked into his Multiverse engine and seemingly obliterated. However, driving home the fact that this villain is nowhere near defeated is a mid-credits scene that introduces us to an entire Council of Kangs.
During a recent interview with Entertainment Tonight, director Peyton Reed shed some light on what that sequence was attempting to convey.
"We knew we wanted to sort of just give a tiny taste of the potential of what some of these Kang variants are and brief nods to [Pharaoh] Rama-Tut, [Scarlet] Centurion, Immortus," the filmmaker said, refusing to confirm or deny whether those are the "Prime" Variants of Kang. "Maybe they're variants of those versions."
There's been a lot of speculation about which Kang joined Rama-Tut and Immortus in that stinger, but these comments confirm it's a take on Scarlet Centurion (albeit with a very different costume to his comic book counterpart).
Reed goes on to describe Rama-Tut as "this sort of ancient Egyptian version in the comics...but then we sort of bent [him] up a little bit and made him this very strange sort of bionic variant of Rama-Tut."
"We wanted to give three distinct feelings," he continues, "and set up the idea of this triumvirate inside this sort of star chamber and now that Kang the Conqueror has met the fate he meets at the end of this movie, 'What does it mean for the larger sort of political body of Kangs, right?'"
"What happens in the sort of Godfather type thing of this power struggle of 'Well, why was he, you know, in the movie?' We revealed that he was exiled into the Quantum Realm and why and who did it. But [we] sort of starting to get into sort of the political aspect of how the Kangs relate to each other, which I think holds really strong potential for Phase Five."
As for the post-credits scene with Loki and Mobius encountering Victor Timely, Reed confirmed he didn't shoot that because it's "actually a cut-down version of a scene from season 2 of Loki."
"It really was to sort of tease the audience with the idea of like, 'In Phase Five, you're going to meet a lot of different variants.'"
It's clear Reed is choosing his words carefully here and several interviews have been published over the past 24 hours with both him and writer Jeff Loveness. None of them really address our many unanswered questions, though, and that's either because Marvel Studios wants to keep us in the dark for now or they simply don't know where this Multiverse Saga is heading!
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is currently playing in theaters.