Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang the Conqueror is at the core of Marvel’s new Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, but the new film also introduces another classic Marvel villain, MODOK, according to the film’s press kit. , director Peyton Reed found the inspiration for these characters in a peculiar source text: the movie Apocalypse Nowby Francis Ford Coppola, from 1979.
“The relationship between Kang and MODOK reminded us of Dennis Hopper with Marlon Brando in Apocalypse NowReed said. “Of course, MODOK doesn’t really have a choice, but he’s totally on board with Kang’s plan by being his literal killing machine.”
In Apocalypse Now, Brando plays Colonel Kurtz, an American officer who has apparently gone completely mad in the jungles of Cambodia, where he has assembled a rebel military unit of his own. Hopper, who plays an American photojournalist, is a maniacal disciple of Kurtz who sees the man as almost something from another world. With Kang and MODOK, it seems their relationship is meant to reflect this fascinating power dynamic..
Reed’s third Ant-Man film wraps up Scott Lang’s trilogy and Kicks off Phase 5 of Marvel, which is willing to up the stakes of the Multiverse Saga. Majors’ Kang is at the center of this new future. With Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars to conclude Marvel’s second saga, the ultra-powerful interdimensional villain is the new Thanos.
MODOK, meanwhile, is more of a secondary villain at Kang’s command.. The villain was originally an arms dealer named George Tarleton who specialized in futuristic weaponry. When he goes too far in his experiments and overdevelops his head, Tarleton becomes a mechanized beast bent on world domination. MODOK, which literally means Mechanized Organism Designed Only to Kill, is an odd character to say the least; frequently, he is used more as the butt of a joke than an existential threat to humanity. However, Reed has always been a fan of his.
“For me it was a personal emotion. I was a kid who spent much of my childhood alone in a room reading Marvel comics and MODOK was always this insane character,” Reed previously said at a press conference attended by /Film. “It’s grotesque. It is a giant head that has been turned into a Mechanized Organism Designed Only to Kill. That was intriguing. So we started talking about whether there would be a place in the MCU or the Ant-Man movies for a live-action version of MODOK. What would that look like and how would we do it?”
The MCU has been trying to figure out the best way to introduce the character into live action for a while now, so it makes sense that fans would be eager to see how Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania brings the big floating head to the big screen.
“He’s a very strange character, to put it mildly,” says Reed. “That’s what was on our minds: how and if we could pull it off. It felt like a challenge for years here at Marvel. And we hit on an idea and we thought we had an idea that we were excited about. I don’t want to say too much. in this forum, but I think the time was right to finally bring MODOK to the big screen“.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania hits theaters on February 17.