Disney Appears To Acknowledge The 'Ant-Man Thanos Butt Meme' In Marvel Short Film

While watching Thanos defeat Earth's mightiest heroes in the Avengers films during the late 2010s, some creative fans surmised that the simplest solution would be for Ant-Man (a superhero whose power is the ability to shrink and grow in size) to somehow shrink enough to get inside Thanos and then, once inside, expand, essentially destroying him from the inside.

The idea that Ant-Man Will Defeat Thanos by Crawling Up His Butt and Expanding was perhaps too obvious and practical a solution for the Marvel gang, who instead applied some far more complicated wizardry regarding interdimensional portals to ultimately save the world.

While this made for what was surely a much more climactic finale to the Thanos arc of The Avengers MCU movies, the question of why Ant-Man simply didn't explode Thanos from the inside has dogged the films, sort of like how the eagles question has dogged Lord of the Rings.

However, Disney appears to have finally acknowledged this possible plot hole in a short film that appears on its cruise ships, which recently went viral online.

Ant-Man explains why he couldn’t go up Thanos’ ass in new clip from ‘Avengers: Quantum Encounter’ 😂 pic.twitter.com/H87I9b48vR

— Culture Crave 🍿 (@CultureCrave) June 30, 2022

In the clip, Paul Rudd, as Ant-Man, says that he's heard "chatter" about the plan and first acknowledges that it's "gross" and nearly begins to lay out why it didn't happen before fellow superhero The Wasp interrupts him.

Unfortunately, we still don't have a canonical explanation about why the so-called "Thanus" solution was not employed by The Avengers during Thanos' ascension to near-universal genocide, though scholars have laid out theories as to why the plan wouldn't work.

Biophysicist Alex Klotz explained that, if Ant-Man had begun expanding in Thanos' rectum, he would not have wrecked 'im generated enough power to destroy Thanos' insides, saying:

I can think of three possibilities: he just gets stuck, rectum-sized, until he shrinks again; [he] tries to expend but builds up so much pressure that it kills him; [Ant-man splurts] out of the anus.

Though we will likely never know how the reference to the meme made it into Disney canon, one can easily imagine that the idea was pitched by the cast itself — Paul Rudd was tickled by the meme when asked about it in a 2018 interview, and Thanos actor Josh Brolin once referenced it in an Instagram post.