The following post contains SPOILERS for the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantuamania post-credits scene.
Even hardcore Marvel fans were unsure about the identity of a character in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s post-credits scene. The sequence in question features an entire council of Kang variants — all played by Jonathan Majors — assembled from through the multiverse to plan, well, bad stuff for the future of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But three of the Kang variants have isolated themselves from the rest, and they privately discuss plans to do, well, even more bad stuff in the MCU.
Kang has been around in Marvel Comics for decades, and during that time he’s adopted many different identities. And two of the three variants in this sequence were very clearly inspired by those characters: Rama-Tut, a Kang who traveled back to ancient Egypt and installed himself as pharaoh, and Immortus, and older variant of Kang who has hung up his conqueror’s armor and begun to comport himself as more of a philosopher and scholar.
Then there was a third version of Majors in the post-credits scene who … didn’t particularly resemble any of Kang’s other numerous variants from the comics. Kang has had a couple other notable identities through the years, including the Scarlet Centurion and Iron Lad, but this mystery man in Quantumania didn’t look like either of those dudes. And there was always the possibility that Marvel decided to introduce a totally new Kang variant for the scene. It wouldn’t be out of character for this guy; Kang tries on new identities the way I try on jeans at Old Navy.
Finally, Quantumania Peyton Reed has settled the matter once and for all in an interview with Entertainment Tonight. It turns out that the third Kang with Immortus and Rama-Tut is Scarlet Centurion after all. Reed said of his intentions with that sequence…
‘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,’ Reed said, referring to the three notable versions of He Who Remains. But he stops short of calling them the ‘prime’ versions of these characters. ‘Maybe they’re variants of those versions,’ he teased.
If I had to bet, I would have guessed the third guy was Scarlet Centurion, simply because that’s the most famous variant of Kang that’s otherwise not in Quantumania. Of course, the Scarlet Centurion is red. (The name is sort of a spoiler, no?) In the comics, he typically looks something like this:
The Centurion of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is wearing silver or a gray-blue armor, and he doesn’t have a gigantic and extremely silly looking helmet. Hence, no one recognized him as that character. So if Reed and Marvel’s intention to give “brief nods” to classic Kang variants, I think they missed the mark with that one.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is now playing in theaters everywhere.
The Coolest Quantumania Easter Eggs
There are some really obscure comic and movie references in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — here are the best ones.
