Luis' Absence From Ant-Man 3 Is The Biggest Travesty Of All
Contains spoilers for "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania"
As its name implies, the vast majority of "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania" takes place in the Quantum Realm, where the heroes end up after Cassie Lang's (Kathryn Newton) experiment to observe this mysterious plane of existence allows a stranded variant of Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors) to suck the Ant-family in the Quantum. However, we also get a lengthy glimpse into Scott Lang's post-"Avengers: Endgame" everyday life in San Francisco.
As small hints in Phase 4 Marvel Cinematic Universe projects suggested, Scott's managed to leverage his status as a Thanos-defeating, Blip-canceling Avenger into cozy celebrity life, complete with a successful book. He's also managed to mend fences with virtually every minor character he clashed with during his less savory days, and is now trying to be a good father to Cassie (Kathryn Newton) after missing so many of her early years. After the main adventure, we return to Scott's life on Earth, and discover that while he's living his life much like he was before the Quantum Realm jaunt, he's secretly immensely concerned about the prospect of multiple Kang variants stalking the world across timelines.
The movie's lengthy opening and closing sequences focus on analyzing Ant-Man's life circumstances, and are delivered as Paul Rudd monologues. Unfortunately, for all his considerable virtues, Rudd isn't the most compelling narrator out there. Still, it's not like there's another, far more superior narrator in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, let alone one who specializes in delivering monologues that analyze Ant-Man's life...
Hold on, there totally is. In fact, the very best narrator in all of MCU is a character from the "Ant-Man" movie series. So why isn't he present in this, the most monologue-heavy "Ant-Man" film out there? Why isn't Luis (Michael Peña) in "Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania?"
Two lengthy narration scenes, yet not a single Luis sighting
The one thing that's tragically missing from "Quantumania" is indeed Luis, the shining light and enthusiastic explanation machine of the first two "Ant-Man" movies. Yes, granted, technically T.I.'s Dave and David Dastmalchian's Kurt are also conspicuously absent, but let's face it, Luis is the one who really hurts — besides, Dastmalchian does portray the slime humanoid Veb in the movie, and has plenty of juicy lines and comedic moments.
According to "Quantumania" director Peyton Reed, Luis was unfortunately never in the cards for the movie. "There were no versions of this movie [with Luis]," Reed told The Hollywood Reporter. "There are a lot of characters in the movie. We obviously have our Lang, van Dyne and Pym family, but then we also introduced Kang, MODOK and all of our Freedom Fighter characters. So we had to make decisions early on about what stories we could tell and what stories we couldn't tell. I love those characters. They were really, really fun and part of the Lang family, but as we got further and further into [development] and knew we wanted to bring the family into the Quantum Realm pretty early in the movie, it just didn't make sense [to include Luis and co.]."
While it's true that "Quantumania" is absolutely packed with characters, the decision to omit Luis seems somewhat difficult to justify when you take into account the fact that the movie begins and ends with lengthy recap narration scenes that are straight from the character's playbook — and that would no doubt have been infinitely more fun with Luis' characteristically manic storytelling style. Just imagine him narrating Scott's end-of-the-movie freakout when he remembers the Quantum Realm Kang's warning that he may have doomed existence by allowing the remaining Kangs run unopposed across the Multiverse. We were deprived of that, yet had to sit through Korg (Taika Waititi) narrating "Thor: Love and Thunder?" A travesty, indeed.