MCU: 10 Fascinating Facts Behind The Avengers (2012)

5. Ant-Man And The Wasp Were Almost Included

When Ant-Man and The Wasp were left out of The Avengers, it was seen as something of an injustice, since they were founding members of the group in the comics. But both were originally planned to appear, with Joss Whedon explaining later why they didn't make the cut.

Ant-Man was left out because there had been plans almost from the first days of the MCU for him to have his own movie (under Edgar Wright's guidance) and Marvel didn't want him to debut in a movie outside of that. So the longer development of Ant-Man pushed him out of the Avengers picture.

Joss Whedon explained that he had wanted The Wasp in and that his early script had The Wasp involved in place of Black Widow. However, Whedon had to scrap that version of the script and eventually conceded that he just couldn't make her introduction work with everything else going on.