Marvel’s Kevin Feige on When We’ll See Evangeline Lilly’s Wasp in the MCU

Evangeline Lilly’s future as Wasp in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is hardly a secret, though we knew for some time prior to the release of Ant-Man that we wouldn’t see her suit-up as the comic book hero in that film. But one of your first reactions after seeing Ant-Man was probably something like, “Great, so when will we see Lilly as Wasp, then?” Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige has an answer. Kind of.

If you haven’t seen Ant-Man yet, then consider the following a spoiler:

During the mid-credits sequence, Michael Douglas’ Hank Pym takes Lilly’s Hope Van Dyne into a secret room, where he shows her the Wasp suit he was designing with Hope’s mother, Janet (the original Wasp) before she died. Hank says he’s ready to finish the suit now, to which Hope responds, “It’s about damn time.”

It’s not quite time just yet because it’ll still be a while before we see Lilly take on the Wasp persona. While Kevin Feige couldn’t say exactly when to expect her big on-screen debut as the hero, he did tell Slashfilm where we won’t see her — in Captain America: Civil War. Feige explains:

She was included in early versions of Civil War but there are so many characters in Civil War that we didn’t want to do her a disservice, like she flies in, ‘I’ve got the costume now’, and she flies out. With Ant-Man, and I’m not saying thats what Ant-Man does in the movie, but we already know him, we’ve already seen him. We haven’t seen her as Wasp and we don’t want to rob the opportunity of seeing her in the outfit for at least almost the first time, and seeing her dynamic with Scott in a way it could play out, so we’re saving it. But its going to be in Phase three for sure.

That makes sense, and given that there have already been criticisms about Ant-Man’s sidelining of Hope Van Dyne (our own Matt Singer wrote about this earlier today), it would be wise for Marvel to make sure she gets some serious spotlight as Wasp.

Marvel’s Phase Three kicks off next year with Captain America: Civil War and concludes with Inhumans in 2019. Where might we see Wasp between now and 2019? Doctor Strange and Spider-Man seem like sensible options.