During the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania press conference on Tuesday, Evangeline Lilly responded very enthusiastically to a question from a journalist about the Wasp getting her own self-titled movie without Ant-Man. But Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige didn't exactly fan those flames when Lilly kicked the question over to him.

　　Lilly was practically giddy when she was asked about the possibility of a Wasp standalone movie.

　　"This is an excellent question. You might have asked the most important question of the day," Lilly replied when Randall Park relayed the question to her. With a huge grin on her face, she then turned to Feige, who was sitting behind her on the stage. "And I'm going to defer this question up the line."

　　Feige, chuckling at Lilly's obvious excitement, then chimed in with a very vague and generic statement that gives little, if any, indication about the prospects of Lilly headlining her own separate movie.

　　"The opportunities within the MCU are endless, as they are in the multiverse, so we will have to see what happens in the future," Feige said.

　　Lilly's enthusiasm wasn't dampened at all by that, piping up one more time before the group moved on to the next question.

　　"Just for the record, if that opportunity did present itself, I'm fully suited up and ready to go!"

　　Evangeline Lilly has played the Hope Van Dyne/The Wasp in three Ant-Man movies, as well as participating in the big battle at the end of Avengers: Endgame, and she's expected to continue to be involved moving forward. It's not difficult to imagine the Ant-Man series evolving to focus on a new hero, like the fourth Captain America movie will. But Ant-Man's daughter Cassie Lang, the hero known as Stinger or Stature in the comics who's played by Katherine Newton in Quantumania, is a more likely candidate for that handoff.

　　But that shift wouldn't need to exclude Lilly. After all, "The Wasp and the Stinger" does have a certain ring to it.

　　Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania lands exclusively in theaters on February 17. It officially kicks off the fifth phase of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, putting the new main franchise villain, Kang the Conqueror, into play after he was originally set up in Loki season 1.

　　Phil Owen on Google+