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Every sports reference in Ant-Man

It’s Marvel Cinematic Universe Week at SB Nation and across our team brands! We’re using the superior superhero franchise to guide our coverage for this week, as we pass the two-month mark without sports.

Here at Fear the Fin, I’m going to take on a very stupid mission: to watch every film in the MCU and document every reference made to sports throughout. I’m playing a little fast and loose with my definition of “sports reference,” but I’m going to try to avoid making the same jokes more than once in this series. You’ll see what I mean.

That’s 23 films, totaling 50 hours, by 11:59 p.m. on Sunday, May 10.

(I’m aware the week starts on Sunday, but the next theme week doesn’t start until Monday and I got a late start on this, okay? I’m cutting myself some slack to make this ridiculous thing a complete project.)

I’ll be watching in a chronological order (some films take place around the same time, so it doesn’t matter too much) that is dubbed the “spoiler” version, as post-credit scenes will contain spoilers for movies further along in the timeline, as opposed to release order.

I’ve set up a storystream to help you keep track of each post as they go up — which won’t be on any kind of set schedule, since I’m gonna be putting some weird hours into this thing in order to pull it off. No worries, though — that’s the whole point of having a centralized location. I’d suggest reading them in order, but hey, I’m not your mom.

Reminder that time stamps are approximate, not exact, and may vary based on streaming services.

Let’s get Paul Rudd up in the Avengers mix, huh?


Ant-Man (2015)

Director: Peyton Reed, Written by Edgar Wright, Joe Cornish, Adam McKay & Paul Rudd

00:21:18: Part of the chain of information about a tip is Luis telling Scott about involved two people named Carlos and Ernesto being on the same softball team. We see a batter on their team swing, miss, and strike out.

The team is named the “Third Strikers,” so I guess that’s fitting.

00:33:10: He’s kinda being forced into it, but even Scott Lang does parkour.

00:50:12: Hope teaches Scott how to punch by … punching him in the face. Hank tells Scott how Hope has trained in the martial arts since her mom died.

Also their basement is decked out with a climbing wall and rings hung from the ceiling.

00:53:24: Training montage, Hope punches Scott in the face again before tackling him to the ground until he taps out.

01:10:01: Hank refers to Scott’s crew as “those three wombats,” which is an underutilized mascot in my opinion.

01:15:21: Scott is basically surfing on a bed of ants inside of this building’s pipes.

01:33:11: The briefcase that Scott and Darren are fighting inside of falls out of a helicopter and into a random family’s backyard swimming pool. The kids are playing ping pong, but the game stops due to their shock, as two fully grown adult men emerge from their pool.

01:45:27: Cassie says she did her first cartwheel today. A gymnastics queen!

If you skipped the Ant-Man movies, you missed out. They’re a lot of fun.

Previous: Avengers: Age of Ultron | Up Next: Captain America: Civil War

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