The post-credits scene has been a staple part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe diet since its inception, with Samuel L. Jackson’s surprise debut as Nick Fury at the end of Iron Man setting a precedent that the rest of the franchise – and Hollywood in general – has been following ever since, but Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania took things to new levels.
While plenty of stingers are designed to be simple teasers that either tie off an unanswered question or two, introduce a new character with a major part to play moving forward, or simply deliver a quick gag to send audiences home happy, the Quantum Realm-set threequel went all-in when it came to putting the building blocks in place for Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.
Jonathan Majors gathered as the Council of Kangs, featuring such luminaries as Scarlet Centurion, Immortus, Rama-Tut, and thousands upon thousands of other variants. As revealed to Variety by editors Adam Gerstel and Laura Jennings, it was a cross-continental undertaking that required a lot more time and effort than your typical MCU credit scene.
“With Kang, it was all motion control. We would shoot one version of Jonathan, and we’d go through with Peyton to pick the performances we liked because every move was ever so slightly different with the focus pull and lens. We had to know if we liked this take of Rama-Tut, we had to know which take of the Scarlet Centurion we’d use. We had our VFX supervisors on set to cover ourselves and get the clean plates.”
Filmed in London while Majors was on the set of Loki‘s second season playing yet another variant in Victor Timely, the Quantumania buffer took four days to shoot and was live-edited to ensure that each performance worked perfectly in sync with the other. Regardless of how you feel about the end product, it can’t be denied that the film pulled out the stops for its grand finale in a way few other Marvel Studios productions ever have.