I can't speak for everyone, but I never expected that Marvel's ANT-MAN would be quite as fun as it ended up, which can only mean good things for the upcoming sequel, ANT-MAN AND THE WASP, which will see Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly) finally strap on The Wasp suit which we saw teased at the end of the first film. Adam McKay (THE BIG SHORT), who worked on the ANT-MAN screenplay with Paul Rudd, is hoping to fill a similar role on the sequel but revealed to IGN that he hasn't been asked back yet.
“I don’t know what my involvement’s going to be yet, I’ve been talking to Peyton Reed and to [Paul] Rudd, but you know Marvel has a process that they do so they may have other writers working on a script – the only thing I tell ‘em is ‘If you need me, I’m here.’ I love working on those – it’s really fun. It was also very fun just writing. And fortunately we had a great director in Peyton Reed so we wrote all this crazy stuff and then he did it really well. I was like ‘I could get used to this!’ It’s certainly a lot easier – I just showed up at the premiere and was like ‘Good job!’
With Marvel looking to expand past their core characters in Phase Three (and beyond), McKay was asked whether or not he thought that Evangeline Lilly might get the opportunity to headline her own standalone Wasp film in the future:
Possibly. I think it all depends on this sequel and how the character plays. Certainly there’s a lot of female superheroes in the Marvel universe so I’m sure you’re going to see them start to spread out. They sort of started with their kind of bedrock characters from the 60s and the 70s and I think you saw more of an explosion of female characters happening in the 80s and then the 90s. X-Men obviously has great female characters, but that’d be interesting, a Wasp movie. I don’t know, that’d be very interesting. I always think of the two of them as kind of together – they always were in the comics – but why not. Sure.
As a fan of both Evangeline Lilly and the character of The Wasp, I think that it'd be a blast to see her take center stage in her own film, but McKay is right, we'll know more after we see how ANT-MAN AND THE WASP plays out; at the very least, I hope that we'll get to see Hope van Dyne pop up in other Marvel films which aren't ANT-MAN sequels.
ANT-MAN AND THE WASP is set for a July 6, 2018 release.