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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania premieres in Westwood with Dr. Raven Baxter on the red carpet
Marvel Studios' third Ant-Man film, set in a Quantum Realm named by a Caltech physicist, opened Phase 5 and premiered at a Westwood theater dating to 1931
Baxter, left, with a guest at the press wall of the Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania world premiere in Westwood, Los Angeles, on February 6, 2023. Photo: Marvel Entertainment video
Marvel's live broadcast from the world premiere of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania showed Dr. Raven Baxter at the film's press wall on February 6, 2023. She walked the red carpet at the Regency Village Theatre in Westwood, Los Angeles, as a guest of Disney.
The film opened Phase 5 of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, according to The Walt Disney Company. It sends Ant-Man and his family into the Quantum Realm, which Disney calls "a place outside space and time." The name came from Spiros Michalakis, a mathematical physicist at Caltech, according to TheWrap. Quantum science was in the news that season. Four months before the premiere, the 2022 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Alain Aspect, John Clauser and Anton Zeilinger for experiments with entangled photons.
Nine days later, Marvel Studios joined the University of Chicago, Argonne National Laboratory and the Chicago Quantum Exchange to host an advance screening in Chicago. A panel on quantum science followed. "Quantum science operates on rules that seem strange and counterintuitive," said David Awschalom, director of the Chicago Quantum Exchange.
The Regency Village Theatre opened in 1931 as the Fox Westwood Village Theatre, near the UCLA campus. Marvel streamed the red carpet live on Marvel.com, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Twitch. Paul Rudd, who first played Ant-Man in 2015, walked the carpet with co-stars Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer, D23 reported.
Baxter on the red carpet at the Regency Village Theatre as a Disney staff member holds a card with her name.
Fans in costume lined the barriers along the carpet. "They've put together costumes for characters that they've only seen for three seconds in a trailer," director Peyton Reed told the livestream hosts.
Fans in costume line the red carpet at the Regency Village Theatre. Baxter is not pictured. Image: Marvel Entertainment video
Reed said getting to create the Quantum Realm was "one of the joys of this movie for me." Asked about its look, he said, "So we looked at a lot of stuff." He named "electron microscope photography" first, then Heavy Metal magazine and science fiction paperback art. Electron microscopes are a standard tool in molecular biology, Baxter's field.
Director Peyton Reed tells Marvel's livestream about the influences behind the Quantum Realm. Baxter is not pictured. Image: Marvel Entertainment video
Three days after the premiere, on February 9, Baxter spoke on the film's Black in STEM panel, held on Zoom during Black History Month. Black workers hold 9% of jobs in science, technology, engineering and math, compared with 11% of all employed adults, Pew Research Center reported in 2021.
The film opened in theaters on February 17. It earned an estimated $104 million in domestic ticket sales and $225 million worldwide in its first weekend, CNBC reported.
Baxter is a molecular biologist who has made science videos as Dr. Raven the Science Maven since 2016. Her doctoral research at the University at Buffalo studied science communication through hip-hop.
Marvel's full red carpet livestream is on YouTube. Baxter appears at the press wall at about 1 hour, 33 minutes.
