Peyton Reed Says 'Ant-Man' Villain Yellowjacket Could Still Be Alive

Ant-Man and the Wasp just hit theaters this past weekend, and while director Peyton Reed was out promoting his new sequel, the conversation turned to the villain of the original movie. Ant-Man villain Darren Cross, AKA Yellowjacket, was assumed dead at the end of the 2015 movie, but in a new interview, Reed implies that things may not be as clear-cut as they seemed.

During a larger talk with ScreenJunkies (via ComicBookMovie), the discussion turned to Yellowjacket and Reed was asked if there were any conversations during the development process of the first movie in which the filmmakers considered not killing their main villain. Reed took umbrage with that reading of the movie, and implied that despite what it looks like on screen, the character may not be as dead as we originally thought:

"Well, I mean, you guys are making a massive assumption. 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..."

When one of the hosts suggests that Cross/Yellowjacket could perhaps have gone subatomic and could be alive in the Quantum Realm, Reed seemed to agree. "He could be somewhere down in the Quantum Realm...could he still be alive down there? I don't know, just throwing that out there."

Here's the scene in question in case you need a refresher:

Before seeing Avengers: Infinity War, I might have thought that Reed's comments may have been just an offhanded suggestion, a fun diversion to get fans talking for a few minutes before their attention turned to something else. But after realizing that Red Skull somehow survived this...

...at the end of Captain America: The First Avenger – or at least was transported to some other plane of existence – then the notion of Yellowjacket surviving that fight and being squashed into the Quantum Realm seems increasingly plausible. After all, the Quantum Realm is a mysterious place where time and space don't work the same as they do in the real world, so it basically grants Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and the rest of the Marvel producers the ability to bring Yellowjacket back at any time if they want to.

But would Marvel actually resurrect that character? Yellowjacket's suit design was kind of cool, but at the end of the day, Darren Cross was sort of a bland corporate hack. He functioned within the confines of the original Ant-Man, but Yellowjacket is definitely a lower-tier Marvel villain, and I can't imagine bringing him back – whether in an Ant-Man movie or any other film in the MCU – would result in anything other than a collective shrugging of shoulders from the audience. Maybe Reed or another Marvel filmmaker will surprise us with some perfectly crafted reason why we desperately need to see Darren Cross once again, but I think Ant-Man fans (and even diehard Corey Stoll fans) would prefer to see the heroes of those movies take on a different challenge moving forward.