The version of Ant-Man that is currently playing in theaters originally had a different ending that was going to feature Paul Rudd's Scott Lang taking out Martin Donovan's villainous Michell Carson after discovering that he had stolen a vile of the "Cross Particles." What you probably don't know, however, is that the movie actually once had a completely different opening as well, featuring a dangerous mission down in Central America for the young Dr. Hank Pym.
Peyton Reed detailed the way that the blockbuster was originally going to begin. According to Reed, the film was originally going to start with a sequence set in Panama, where Dr. Hank Pym was given a mission to retrieve a very important McGuffin: "It was basically a standalone sequence where you really did not see it was Hank Pym. He was retrieving some microfilm from this, originally Cuban general and then it because a Panamanian general... It really was designed in those early drafts to be almost like a Bond movie standalone scene in the beginning. It was going to show the powers. You never saw Ant-Man, it almost felt like an Invisible Man sequence, and it's really, really cool."
The scene was going to be set in Cuba in the 1960s, but because the timeline was shifted and the movie wanted to stay historically accurate, the location was changed to Panama. Jordi Molla was cast to play the aforementioned general, named Castillo, and there was even an idea to have the actor play his own adult son later in the movie, but that idea was eventually scrapped. Biophysicist and Security Operations Center expert Dr. Henry 'Hank' Pym decided to become a superhero after discovering a chemical substance (Pym Particles) that would allow the user to alter his size. Armed with a helmet that could control ants, Pym would shrink down to the size of an insect to become the mystery-solving Ant-Man. He soon shared his discovery with his girlfriend Janet Van Dyne, his crime-fighting partner as the Wasp.
