Superficially, Doctor Strange and Ant-Man have a lot in common. They are Marvel's newest solo movies, and in this post-Avengers world, feel isolated by their initial separation from the joined up events of the Captain America and Iron Man films that we've become so used to.
But the newest featurette for Marvel Studios' next movie hints that there could be a deeper connection between the two films.
The video includes a clip of Benedict Cumberbatch's Stephen Strange falling through a series of parallel worlds after an encounter with Tilda Swinton's mystic The Ancient One.
Apart from recalling the final scenes of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the psychedelic effects also bear a striking resemblance to the Quantum Realm first introduced in Ant-Man.
[Doctor Strange travels through other dimensions]
The Quantum Realm is the dimension that Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) enters when he shrinks too small - one that was initially believed to be inescapable until Lang was able to return.
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That event left the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym, wondering if his long-lost wife Janet Van Dyne (aka The Wasp) might have survived after disappearing into the Quantum Realm decades earlier.
[Ant-Man in the Quantum Realm]
If Doctor Strange can access the same dimension without having to risk shrinking himself into non-existence, could he be involved in the rescue of Van Dyne in his film or the upcoming Ant-Man and the Wasp?
This isn't the first hint at a connection between the two heroes.
"If you look up the study of quantum mechanics, when you get down that small, as Hank Pym says, space time is meaningless, and there's a lot of that stuff that applies to Doctor Strange," Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige told Cinema Blend in 2015.
Doctor Strange will be released on October 25 in the UK and on November 4 in the US.
