Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania writer Jeff Loveness recently claimed that the Quantum Realm somehow exists “outside of space and time.”
Speaking with Marvel.com in an attempt to hype up the latest release in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Loveness and producer Stephen Broussard discussed the Quantum Realm.
First, Broussard detailed, “The Quantum Realm is just as big an idea as any of the things in any of the other worlds we’ve explored in the MCU to date.”
He added, “It’s a world unto itself not unlike Asgard or Wakanda or the world of the mystic arts in Doctor Strange. Getting the chance to establish something that big, and that big in part three of a film has been really, really fun.”
Loveness then relayed, “We really wanted to build it from the ground up and we thought how do we make this different from just outer space, how do we make this different from underwater like Namor’s kingdom Talokan?”
“We came up with [the idea] that basically it’s like the basement of the Multiverse. It’s this connected limbo outside of space and time,” he explained.
However, this description that it is outside space and time doesn’t match up to the previous installment, Ant-Man and the Wasp, where the whole plot of the film revolves around Janet van Dyne providing her precise location in the Quantum Realm so that Hank Pym can use a Quantum Tunnel to rescue her.
If the Quantum Realm was actually outside of space then Janet van Dyne would not need to give her exact location in the Quantum Realm, where the realm and van Dyne do indeed take up space just on a sub-atomic level.
As for the realm being outside of time, this also does not make any sense given Janet van Dyne clearly aged at the same rate as Hank Pym despite being in the Quantum Realm. Thus she and the Quantum Realm are still subject to the forces of time.
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Not only does the Quantum Realm now apparently exist outside time and space, but it doesn’t adhere to earth’s physics despite the entire basis of accessing the Quantum Realm is via calculations used by Hank Pym based on physics.
Evangeline Lilly revealed the Quantum Realm contains, “Vicious suns that can eat you, blobs that can morph, broccolis that can fight in battles, buildings that are part of a freedom fighter brigade.”
She adds, ““You look across the landscape and [don’t] see anything you would expect to see on planet Earth. Things like gravity functions differently so you have water dripping upward instead of downward, and you have clouds that don’t move in any way that resembles our reality.”
“It’s going to be as silly and fun as it will be sweeping and epic and beautiful. It’s going to be very elegant and very graceful,” Lilly asserted.
Given all of this information, it appears the Quantum Realm is being reconfigured for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. It no longer appears to be an actual subatomic realm that can be accessed through Pym particles and a Quantum Tunnel, but some kind of mystical realm.
Maybe the film will do a better job of explaining the Quantum Realm than the film’s writer, but at this point it feels like another major break in the continuity that is the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
On top of this, it’s unclear what Marvel employees actually mean when they say a location exists outside of space and time. If you recall, in Loki the Time Variance Authority’s headquarters supposedly exists outside of space and time.
However, by the end of the first season, Loki is seemingly transported back to the Time Variance Authority’s headquarters after his fight with Sylvie, but he discovers this is an altogether different Time Variance Authority headquarter with a variant of He Who Remains seemingly being in charge as a statue of him is seen.
Now, it’s possible this is just a different Time Variance Authority headquarter that is also outside of space and time and thus wouldn’t be affected by the death of He Who Remains, but if that’s the case that begs the question as to how Sylvie got the coordinates. No, it’s more likely the Time Variance Authority did not actually operate outside of space and time and was thus reconfigured upon the death of He Who Remains.
And if that’s the case that leads to a whole other set of questions regarding time travel and we already know how muddled that is within the Marvel Cinematic given the conflicting explanations in Avengers: Endgame and Loki as well as how it actually plays out.
What do you make of this claim that the Quantum Realm exists outside of time and space?