Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man franchise operates in a much smaller corner of the Marvel Cinematic Universe than the rest of the Avengers, with Scott Lang more likely to be found protecting his friends and family than saving the entire universe. That being said, he was the person that set the plot of Avengers: Endgame in motion and came up with the idea for the time heist, so there’s every chance he could become a more integral part of the shared mythology in the future.
As a result of the more contained stories and relatively minor stakes, Ant-Man’s solo outings so far haven’t pulled in the same kind of all-conquering box office numbers as his contemporaries, with the first two being the lowest-grossing solo entries in the MCU that were released following the conclusion of Phase One, but a combined worldwide haul of over $1.1 billion is hardly a disappointment.
Ant-Man 3 has been rumored to start shooting next summer, and Reed recently gave a very minor update on the status of the project, but a new report claims that the third installment could arrive as soon as 2022. That seems like an awfully quick turnaround for an effects-heavy blockbuster, especially when Marvel still have four release dates lying wide open in 2023.
The only available slot left in 2022 is October, which would give Ant-Man 3 less than eighteen months from the proposed start date to finish pre-production, casting, shooting, editing and post-production, and in the grand scheme of things, a year and a half isn’t really a whole lot of time to get a movie of this sort of scale completed from start to finish, especially when you consider the huge effects that restrictions surrounding a return to work in a post-COVID-19 environment will have on any major shoot.