30-06-2025
Marvel Star Teases A Surprise Return in 'Avengers: Secret Wars'
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Last year, Evangeline Lilly announced she was retiring from acting, but a response the "Lost" star made in a recent social media post has fans wondering if she's hinting at coming back as Hope van Dyne/The Wasp in "Avengers: Secret Wars".
Lilly posted an image of herself to Instagram posing with a fan cosplaying as Wolverine at the Australian convention Supanova Expo.
When another fan named "sm_himself" responded to the post with "Very subtle way to say that Hope & Logan will have some screen time together in Secret Wars", Lilly responded with a winking smiley emoji.
Read More: 'Spider-Man' Director Reveals Why He Quit 'Fantastic Four'
A winking emoji is far from a confirmation, but at the very least, it's a surprising tease, particularly from someone retired from acting.
Promotional material for "Avengers: Endgame."
Promotional material for "Avengers: Endgame."
DISNEY
Lilly first played Hope van Dyne in 2015's "Ant-Man", though she didn't get to suit up as her heroic alter-ego, The Wasp, until 2018's "Ant-Man & The Wasp". She went on to reprise her role both in 2023's "Ant-Man & The Wasp: Quantumania" and in 2019's "Avengers: Endgame".
Neither Lilly's name nor Hugh Jackman's appeared on any of the chairs announcing the cast of next year's "Avengers: Doomsday", but if Anthony and Joe Russo plan to do something similar to what they did in "Avengers: Infinity War" and its follow-up "Endgame", then it would make sense for the cast of "Secret Wars" to be much larger even than the already massive cast for "Doomsday".
In the "Secret Wars" comic book series, the entire Marvel multiverse is destroyed but then remade by Doctor Doom. Instead of a multiverse, all of existence is whittled down to a single planet: Battleworld.
Battleworld is made up of different nations based on Marvel Comics events (e.g. the savage Greenland is based on "Planet Hulk" and the Monarchy of M is based on "House of M").
The world is populated with multiple variants of each Marvel Comics hero and villain. For example, Doom's army is the Thor Corps, made up of hundreds of variant Thors.
There's no telling how closely Anthony and Joe Russo plan to stick to the source material, but if it's anything at all like the comics, they're going to need a huge cast to populate Battleworld. It's not out of the realm of possibility that they would ask Lilly to step out of retirement to help them out.
"Avengers: Doomsday" releases December 18, 2026, while the follow-up "Avengers: Secret Wars" is scheduled to hit theaters December 17, 2027.
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