Ant-Man Director On How Quantum Realm Could Open Door To Time Travel

In an interview with The Huffington Post, Ant-Man and the Wasp director Peyton Reed spoke about how the film’s Quantum Realm could open the door for time travel in the MCU, particularly with the next Avengers film. Here are highlights:

On if Ant-Man could have been in past Avengers scenes: “I think based on the science that we’ve set up in the first movie and this one, I won’t rule out the possibility because, again, we are dealing with a time vortex. That could happen. [Ant-Man] could be anywhere. There could be different probabilities. There could be different versions of every MCU movie. We’re the 20th MCU movie. Maybe there’s a universe where there’s 200 MCU movies. They’re all different versions. That’s the beauty of the Quantum Realm. It’s dramatically fertile and flexible.”

On naming the area: “I’m like, ‘Wait a minute. It should be the Quantum Realm.’ And they’re like, ‘Quantum Realm? Sounds great. We’ll call it the Quantum Realm.’ And then from there it took on its own life.”

On time travel and alternate dimensions: “Oh, yes, all of that, of course. There is no notion of time yet… Things don’t exist down there, so you’re exploring different states, different dimensions, and you can’t even tell which is time, which is space. Of course, you can go back and forth in time. Potentially, time is not a singular dimension. It is, itself, potentially a whole universe of dimensions included in it. It’s just a label. [The] Quantum Realm potentially is infinite,” Reed said. “We had to distill it down to how much Quantum Realm we wanted to show in the body of this movie, and how much dramatically this movie could contain, because from the beginning I had this mandate that [the movie has] got to be under two hours. Because it’s a comedy, and it’s fast-moving.”