Although it had been assumed that he’d met a rather grisly end during his climactic confrontation with Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang in the original Ant-Man when his Yellowjacket suit was shrunk down to sub-atomic size with him inside, it seems that Corey Stoll’s Darren Cross will be making his return to the Marvel Cinematic Universe in next year’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
The casting was revealed by Vanity Fair following this week’s episode of Loki, which featured a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a giant Yellowjacket helmet was spotted in The Void, and follows an earlier social media posting from Evangeline Lilly where she’d listed Stoll among her co-stars in the Marvel threequel.
As it happens, Ant-Man director Peyton Reed had suggested back in 2018 that we may not have seen the last of Yellowjacket, the filmmaker stating that: “There’s an assumption here that I’m not quite comfortable with. If you watch his death in the first Ant-Man, the suit is compromised, he shrinks and goes into a thing…I mean, he could be somewhere down in that Quantum Realm.”
While plot details for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania are being kept under wraps, we do know that Jonathan Majors (Lovecraft Country) is set to star as the sequel’s villain Kang the Conqueror, who has been heavily speculated as the ‘man behind the curtain’ in Marvel’s Loki series.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is being directed by Peyton Reed and stars Paul Rudd (Scott Lang/Ant-Man), Evangeline Lilly (Hope Van Dyne/The Wasp), Michael Douglas (Hank Pym) and Michelle Pfeiffer (Janet Van Dyne) along with MCU new additions Kathryn Newton (Freaky) as Cassie Lang and Jonathan Majors (Lovecraft Country) as Kang the Conqueror.
Ant-Man and the Wasp Quantumania is set for release on February 17th 2023.