Doctor Strange refused to indulge one request from the MCU's tiniest Avenger, Ant-Man, after the events of 2019's Avengers: Endgame.
Plenty of unseen moments from Avengers: Endgame have come to the forefront in the four years since its record-shattering release, from scenes that didn't make the final cut to more detailed accounts of moments filling in MCU timeline gaps.
Ant-Man star Paul Rudd even joked around about a mistake that made the movie where his hero was seen in two places at once in the final battle, getting a good laugh out of an error in Marvel Studios' biggest theatrical release ever.
Doctor Strange Says "No" to Ant-Man
Marvel's official website released a snippet of Scott Lang's autobiography, Look Out for the Little Guy, which was seen at the beginning of Marvel Studios' Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.
The excerpt kicks off looking back at how Bruce Banner and Clint Barton took Scott out to lunch one day to ask him to write the book in the first place after the events of Avengers: Endgame. While this gave Scott major confidence, it also sent him into "a frighteningly steep plummet into self-doubt:"
"The only thing is, it wasn’t actually 100 percent settled for me—on the inside. From the confidence peak of having two amazing Super Heroes place their trust in you, there was a frighteningly steep plummet into self-doubt. Even with their sensible reasons, the whole affair just stirred up a question that’s been burning inside me most of my adult life:
Why me?"
This led him to think back to long before his time alongside Earth's Mightiest Heroes, reminiscing on working at VistaCorp before pulling the heist that landed him in jail before the events of 2015's Ant-Man:
"I’ve been asking myself that since before I even met the Avengers. Back when I was working at VistaCorp, why was I the only one who couldn’t sleep at night after learning of all the money they were stealing from customers? Why did I basically give up my job, give up my marriage, and spend three years in San Quentin, just so I could play Robin Hood?"
It also still hurt Scott that he was "the one who ended up going down" when VistaCorp's corruption went public, unable to understand the reasons that he had to take the fall:
"And finally—and this one still smarts—when VistaCorp’s nasty business became public to the world, why was I the one who ended up going down for it?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. And perhaps I never will."
He even asked Benedict Cumberbatch's Doctor Strange about why it all happened, although Strange refused to fill Ant-Man in "about any of [his] 14,000,605 possible pasts" that may have turned out differently:
"Not even Doctor Strange can tell me, and believe me, it’s not for my lack of asking. Once the purple dust had settled from the Battle of Earth, I tried bonding with the guy. Let’s just say, he was either unwilling or uninterested in filling me in about any of my 14,000,605 possible pasts."
Doctor Strange Holding Back on Ant-Man & Avengers
"You mess with time, it tends to mess back."
-Tony Stark, 'Avengers: Endgame'
MCU films like Avengers: Endgame and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, along with the Loki series, have proven just how much the Multiverse can be affected by alternate realities and messing with time.
And with Doctor Strange's already extensive experience traveling through the Multiverse and studying its existence, it seems to make sense why he held back information from Ant-Man on what his alternate selves went through.
These ideas will likely be explored further in projects like Loki Season 2 along with the next two Avengers movies, which are sure to show how dangerous it will be in the MCU to mess with the Multiverse on a grand scale.
But with Doctor Strange sure to be a key player in future projects, he'll assuredly have to give his Avengers cohorts some kind of rundown on what to expect as other dimensions open up for Earth-616's residents and heroes.
Look Out for the Little Guy is open for online pre-orders, and it will be available on shelves and online on September 5. Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is available to stream now on Disney+.
