Ant-Man 3 Lands Screenwriter From Rick & Morty Team

Although Ant-Man 3 has yet to appear on any official Marvel Studios release schedule — except maybe for that big, years-spanning whiteboard in Kevin Feige’s office that we’ve all heard about — a script for the movie has been commissioned and a writer has been hired to pen it.

That writer is Jeff Loveness, who has been a co-producer and member of the writers’ room for the animated Rick & Morty series for much of the last year or so. Loveness got his start writing on Jimmy Kimmel Live! From 2011 to 2015, and his other credits include the Oscars, the Emmys and a stint on the TBS series Miracle Workers, starring Daniel Radcliffe.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, Loveness has also written comics for Marvel’s publishing arm, including books starring Spider-Man, Groot and Nova.

Loveness landed the gig and began writing just as all of Hollywood was shutting down production due to the coronavirus, so at the moment he has plenty of time to sit at his desk at home and bang out the third solo outing for Marvel’s tiny superhero.

In fact, since Ant-Man 3 has not been officially announced by Marvel yet, it’s not clear when the movie would start shooting. Marvel has just shifted the release dates for its next seven announced films, from Black Widow to Captain Marvel 2, which means that production schedules on many of those will be changing as well. It remains to be seen where Ant-Man 3 will fit into that, but we’d guess that shooting will begin in mid-2021 at the earliest.

In the meantime, director Peyton Reed, who helmed Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp, is coming back for the third one as well, having closed his deal last November. Paul Rudd (Ant-Man), Evangeline Lilly (Wasp) and Michael Douglas (Hank Pym) are all expected to return as well, although their participation is not yet confirmed.

Rudd’s Scott Lang played a key role in the plot of last year’s Avengers: Endgame, persuading the Avengers that Hank Pym’s portal into the quantum realm could be used to travel backwards in time and undo Thanos’ decimation of life in the universe. There has been scattered fan speculation that Lang’s now teenaged daughter Cassie (Emma Fuhrmann) could play a significant role in the third Ant-Man film.