The two end credits scenes from Quantumania, explained.
This post contains spoilers for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania has two end credits scenes, and one of them sets the tone for the next phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The other brings us back to a beloved Marvel antihero.
Spoilers for Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania below.
By the end of Quantumania, it looks like Scott Lang aka Ant-Man (Paul Rudd) and Hope Pym aka The Wasp (Evangeline Lilly) saved the day. Together they defeated Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), a powerful villain who sees all parallel universes as a threat and has the power to eliminate them. Our heroes have escaped the quantum realm and reunited with Hope’s father and original Ant-Man Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), Hope’s mother and original Wasp Janet Van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Scott’s daughter Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton). And in the film’s final scene, they all share a cake for Cassie’s fake birthday party, a gesture Scott says to make up for those he missed during the blip.
It’s all very cute! But cute doesn’t last forever in the MCU.
There are movies that need teasing, villains that need to be established, and a grand conflict that needs a spark. And the credits scenes are doing just that, potentially setting the MCU up for years to come (thanks in large part to majors, which will definitely come back in a big, bad way).
Quantumania’s mid-credits scene establishes Kang as the MCU’s big bad
Quantumania’s mid-credits scene, like the film as a whole, relies heavily on the audience’s familiarity with the idea of the multiverse. Essentially: there are multiple parallel timelines happening at the same time, and many versions of us – well, many versions of the characters in the MCU – are spread across those timelines. We saw a glimpse of it in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Spider-Man: No Way Home with variants of Doctor Strange, Wanda Maximoff and of course Spider-Man.
And the great thing about Quantumania is that Kang the Conqueror, the film’s big, unstoppable villain, is dangerous because he’s figured out how to manipulate time and travel the multiverse.
Kang, as established in the film, had been banished to the Quantum Realm – the largely unknown subatomic world that exists beneath ours – because of the catastrophic threat he posed. You can’t get in unless you shrink to the smallest size, and you can’t get out unless you have the technology to navigate it. And because time works differently in the multiverse, you can get lost there for eternity.
Oooooh. Aaaah. So sparkling!
Courtesy of Marvel
In the mid-credits scene, we find out who banned him: his variants! Various versions of Kang – in the comics they include Immortus, Rama-Tut, Baby Kang, and the Council of Kangs – have a Kang-only meeting and say that Ant-Man successfully killed the Kang they sent to the Quantum Realm has. You’d think the Kangs would be happy to hear this news, since they were the ones who sent him away.
But unfortunately it’s not that simple.
While the Kangs are indeed glad that the Kang they saw as a major threat is now dead, they are concerned about the power Ant-Man possesses. They don’t like that someone who can kill a Kang is out there in the multiverse with the power to ruin their plans. To counter this threat, the main Kangs have assembled an army of Kangs, and just as the scene goes black, they hint that the threats – Ant-Man and his fellow Avengers in the main MCU timeline – will be eliminated .
Given how powerful Kang the conqueror of the Quantum Realm was, the scene pitches the Kang variants as the MCU’s big villains. Multiple Kangs descending on Earth would require multiple Avengers to protect them, which fits comfortably in a huge team-up movie like Infinity War or Endgame. But what’s also relevant here is that while the Kangs won’t appear in every movie from now on, the scene is set so that they’re always watching and looming. Every action the Avengers take and every villain they defeat is rumored to be pursued and investigated by an army of Kangs bent on destroying them.
The end credits tease Loki’s second season
The final credits scene of Quantumania is much shorter. It starts in the 1910s or 1920s with a man named Victor Timely. Timely is played by Jonathan Majors, visually signaling that this man is also a Kang variant, ding ding ding! Timely stands at the top of a stage giving an amazing presentation about what appears to be some kind of scientific experiment.
Then the focus shifts to the viewers, and lo and behold, it’s Loki (Tom Hiddleston) and Mobius M. Mobius (Owen Wilson). Just before the scene ends, Loki tells Mobius that Timely is the most fearsome and powerful man he has ever met.
Loki’s fear of watching Timely stems from what happened on his Disney+ show of the same name. In the finale, he meets a man who calls himself He Who Remains. Played by majors, as you might have guessed, He Who Remains is also… a Kang variant! As He, the Variant, was responsible for ensuring that multiversal war did not break out – and in trying to prevent that war, He eliminated stray timelines and created the Time Variance Authority to protect the “sacred” timeline, also known as the main timeline, maintained in which the MCU operates.
The problem is that the last time we saw Mobius was in the Loki season 1 finale, Mobius didn’t recognize Loki. Which means a lot of things must have happened to get to the point where Loki and Mobius are now chasing Timely and maybe criss-crossing time. The ending scene is a tantalizing teaser for Loki’s second season, which premieres this summer.