The Ant-Man franchise may be dead for a reason nobody has ever reported.
The claim comes out of Wednesday’s Nerdrotic Nooner, where host Gary “Nerdrotic” Buechler and Film Threat’s Chris Gore told what they called “the Ant-Man story,” a tale both men said they heard from the same source.
A clip of the exchange has already pulled north of 140,000 views on X.
The label up front: all of this is unconfirmed, so file it as rumor. But pieces of it line up with what is already on the record, which is worth walking through.
The Alleged Ant-Man: Quantumania Set Fight
Around the 1 hour 11 minute mark, Buechler laid it out: during production on 2023’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a disturbance allegedly broke out on set between Michelle Pfeiffer and Evangeline Lilly over the production’s COVID restrictions.
As the story goes, Pfeiffer tried to defuse things, telling Lilly she understood and respected her position, but that they still had a movie to make, the rules were the rules, and Lilly needed to stop shaming the crew over it.
Lilly is then said to have stormed off.
Director Peyton Reed allegedly followed and touched her on the shoulder, and Lilly swung around and “decked” him, knocking Reed over and, per the claim, injuring him badly.
Both Buechler and Gore stressed the blow was an accident, not intentional.
“That’s why Ant-Man is dying and the franchise is done,” Buechler said, adding of Lilly, “she won’t be back for sure.”
What Is On The Record
Quantumania filmed in the second half of 2021, largely at Pinewood Studios in the UK, at the height of Hollywood’s pandemic-era set protocols.
Lilly was one of the industry’s most outspoken opponents of mandates, revealing in January 2022, weeks after the film wrapped, that she attended the Defeat the Mandates rally in Washington, D.C. to support “bodily sovereignty.”
The shoot itself has been described as turbulent before: co-star Katy O’Brian called the production “absolutely chaotic” in 2024, saying new pages and new fight choreography were still arriving on the final day of filming.
And the aftermath fits the shape of the story.
Lilly announced she was stepping away from acting in June 2024, despite having pitched Variety on a Wasp standalone film during the Quantumania press tour.
No fourth Ant-Man has ever been announced following Quantumania‘s disappointing $476 million worldwide box office.
Paul Rudd and Kathryn Newton are both on the Avengers: Doomsday cast list. Lilly, Pfeiffer, and Michael Douglas are not, and Douglas has said he would only return for a fourth film if Marvel killed Hank Pym off.
So the Langs are in. The Pym and Van Dyne side of the family is done.
The same episode also dug into what is allegedly going on inside the Avengers: Doomsday editing room, where actor egos are said to have arrived alongside the cuts.
The full episode is below; the Ant-Man story starts at the 1:11:26 mark.
