Why Is Michael Peña Missing From the ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ Trailers?

We know that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania features the highly anticipated return/debut of Kang the Conqueror (Jonathan Majors), but does it have our favorite side character? When Ant-Man premiered in 2015, there was one side character who nearly stole the whole show: Michael Peña’s Luis. He delivered again in Ant-Man and the Wasp, but Peña has been suspiciously absent from the marketing for Quantumania. What gives?

We love Luis

Like Scott Lang (Paul Rudd), Luis has been in prison but is less determined than Lang to stay out of it. He quickly ropes a dejected Lang into participating in a burglary, unaware they’re being manipulated by Hank Pym (Michael Douglas). Even after Lang gets roped into being Ant-Man, Luis sticks by his side. He also made audiences laugh out loud with his habit of turning simple stories into long-winded disjointed accounts.

Shortly after Ant-Man was released, fans began calling for Luis to provide recaps of the entire MCU in his characteristic manner. Given the praise he received for his performance, Peña came back for the sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp. In the film, he and Lang have started a business called Ex-Con Security Consultants and have dropped their criminal lifestyles. Of course, he’s also still the loyal best friend of Lang and even gets in on some of the superhero action. At the end of the film, he nabs a business deal with one of Ex-Con Security Consultants’ biggest clients.

However, Luis hasn’t been seen since Ant-Man and the Wasp, and quite a bit has happened since then, including Thanos (Josh Brolin)’s snap. We don’t even know if Luis is one of the characters who disappeared or remained after the blip. For all we know, he could’ve aged five years. Meanwhile, we’re also concerned that he has not been spotted in any of the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania promotional materials. Plus, with most of the film taking place in the Quantum Realm, it’s unclear if Luis will have a place in it.

Related: Best MODOK Decks in Marvel Snap on Twinfinite

Is Luis in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania?

Unfortunately, Peña is not in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. He does not even appear in a brief cameo in the film. Director Peyton Reed shed a little bit of light on the situation in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. The major reason for his absence was simply that the movie already had too much going on with too many characters. Plus, the vast majority of the film takes place in the Quantum Realm, so it didn’t really make sense to have Peña appear. He told the news outlet:

There were no versions of this movie [with Luis]. There are a lot of characters in the movie. We obviously have our Lang, van Dyne and Pym family, but then we also introduced Kang, MODOK and all of our Freedom Fighter characters. So we had to make decisions early on about what stories we could tell and what stories we couldn’t tell. I love those characters. They were really, really fun and part of the Lang family, but as we got further and further into [development] and knew we wanted to bring the family into the Quantum Realm pretty early in the movie, it just didn’t make sense [to include Luis and co.].

Fans started to suspect something was amiss when they noticed Peña’s absence from the promotional materials. Plus, both Marvel and the actor remained tight-lipped about his potential appearance until the film’s release date. In an interview with ComicBook’s Brandon Davis in August 2022, when asked if he would be in the film, Peña replied, “Who knows?” He also expressed confusion about why people keep asking when he isn’t allowed to give out any details about the film.

Some had also wondered if Peña would play a different role in the film, as David Dastmalchian did. Fans will recall that Dastmalchian appeared in the first two Ant-Man films as Kurt, one of Luis’s and Lang’s ex-con buddies. In an interview with Screen Rant, Dastmalchian stated that he wasn’t going to be brought back for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. Many feared this meant that all of the Ex-Con Security Consultants were at risk of not returning. However, The Hollywood Reporter later confirmed that Dastmalchian was going to be in Quantumania, but would be playing a character named Veb.

Viewers discovered upon the film’s release that Dastmalchian was the voice actor for Veb, a Freedom Fighter in the Quantum Realm who resembles a blob. Hence, given that Dastmalchian himself wasn’t seen in the film, his recasting wasn’t problematic. Sadly, there just wasn’t such a role for Peña in the film. Hopefully, he’ll have an opportunity to return elsewhere in the MCU’s future.

(featured image: Marvel Studios)