According to Variety earlier today, the cast for Ant-Man and The Wasp just got one person bigger — Fresh Off the Boat actor, Randall Park, has joined the cast as SHIELD Agent Jimmy Woo.
Yes, you read that correctly — SHIELD Agent Jimmy Woo.
Though he was first published in the 50’s — when Marvel was still Atlas Comics and before Spider-Man or The Fantastic Four had burst through their pages — Marvel revisited his character a couple times before finally putting him as the lead in his own mini-series in the mid 2000’s, simply titled The Agents of Atlas. Woo led a team comprised of other Marvel heroes from the 50’s, such as Gorilla Man, Venus, The Uranian (a.k.a. Marvel Boy), M-11 and Namor’s cousin, Namora.
All of this raises a question — Isn’t SHIELD done in the movies, at least for the most part?
ABC’s series, Agents of SHIELD, is going into its fifth season and appears to be taking place more in space than on earth. Since the fall of SHIELD in Captain America: Winter Soldier, the clandestine organization has not made an appearance in any Marvel film. In fact, even Director Nick Fury, played by Samuel L. Jackson, hasn’t appeared in a film since Avengers: Age of Ultron. So, does the inclusion of Randall Park as Agent Jimmy Woo mean that SHIELD is making a resurgence in the Marvel Cinematic Universe?
Our guess is no. In the same way that the first Ant-Man film started out with a flashback to the early 90’s, seeing a younger Hank Pym visiting an older Howard Stark (John Slattery) and Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) in the the Triskelion as it was being built, it’s likely that we’ll see a similar flashback here. This is especially true because, as a product of the 50’s, it’s likely that Marvel would want to keep him there. Not to mention, this film will most likely revisit the younger years of Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne working together to topple Communism and keep under control the constant threat of nuclear war.
In fact, what would make this even more fun is if they brought in any of the other Agents of Atlas and kept that retro-futuristic aesthetic to all of their designs. For instance, The Uranian is an Earth-born boy raised on Uranus by the Eternals there (You know, where Thanos is from in the comics) to escape Nazi Germany. He has a flying saucer and everything. M-11 is a robot that fervently belongs in the 50’s, clearly taking design cues from cinematic robots like Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still.
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In other words, Agents of Atlas is 50’s comic pulp at it’s best and that’s where it works best, so flashbacks seem most obvious.
However, we also have a theory about this film that Janet Van Dyne, The OG Wasp, will be discovered in the Quantum-verse, still alive, and it seems entirely possible that when Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) and Hope Van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) both arrive in the quantum-verse, they will discover not just their mother, but also the Agents of Atlas.
Though, to be fair, this is most likely our own fangirl and fanboy dreams — it’s more likely to be a flashback as that would fit in with the framework of the first film and would not require a resurgence of SHIELD in the modern Avengers universe.
That being said, if in the next few weeks you hear names like Gorilla Man, Ken Hale, Arthur Nagan, Robert Grayson, Venus or Delroy Garrett — get excited, because that means we’ll most likely see The Agents of Atlas in some capacity.
He has two cats and knows all things about Doctor Strange but little else.
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