Unlike Thor, Ant-Man did get a dedicated wave during the time of his movie. It just, only had one movie figure in it, Ant-Man, and the rest of the wave was Ant-Man themed comic characters, sort of, the 3 villains of the wave weren’s Ant-Man villains. the Build a Figure was AoE Ultron, though in the comics Hank Pym built Ultron, not Tony Stark. Anyway, the point is, there wasn’t a Yellowjacket figure, comic or otherwise. Marvel has seriously shied away from doing figures of the movie villains for whatever reason. This set remedies that problem.
It also remedies another problem. The MCU Ant-Man figure we got for the first movie had a horribly inaccurate head. It was based on some pre-production art or something, because the head had a visible human mouth and the breather unit was attached to the chin. In the movie, Paul Rudd’s face isn’t visible while he is in the suit. The head for this set is more accurate to the movie’s design. There is also an unmasked Paul Rudd head as well. It’s different than the one from the recent Ant-Man and the Wasp version, with the goofy smirk. Unfortunately, the heads are not cross compatible, they use entirely different pegs. I have no idea why Hasbro hasn’t standardized the head pegs. It seems like it could only be a win for the on the production side, since it would mean easier parts reuse, and it would mean for easier head swaps for people who buy the figures.
Aside from the heads, the An-Man is essentially identical to the original release. The red parts have a bit of extra texturing to them, but it’s the same sculpt otherwise. Including the slightly weird hands. The better Ant-Man is nice, but the real winner of this set is Yellowjacket. It’s nice to see Hasbro finally pushing a lot of the villains from the MCU out, because they all had some really nice designs and having someone for the hero to fight is always good.
The figure itself is pretty much what you’d expect. It’s similar to the Ant-Man in that it’s a little stiff and clunky in design, but a lot of the MCU figures fall into this bucket, it fits with the “realistic” look and style though, so it’s not a huge problem. The fun part is his backpack and the pair of stingers hanging off of it. There are several extra joints to let them pose in several different ways, though it kind of feels like there could be a few more joints to make it perfect. It holds to his back well though and does the job. He generally looks pretty menacing and matches the movie design well. The upper stinger pylon things don’t have any joints though, which is kind of a bummer. He also doesn’t have an unmasked Corey Stoll head, which is kind of a bummer, though I don’t recall him ever wearing the suit without the helmet either.
The set also includes a set of micro sized Ant-Man and Yellowjacket figures. They are the same ones included with the original Ant-Man release with marginally better paint. It’s a nice extra bit but nothing super amazing. The mini figures don’t even really stand on their own or anything.
So, unlike the Thor and Sif set, this set has a much broader appeal. Ant-Man is a much more well received film than the Thor movies and the re-release figure is a definite improvement over it’s original release, so it feels like less of toss aside item than the Thor. Yellowjacket is also a nice figure with a little more play value than Sif. It’s a good set overall.
