Once upon a time, well before Robert Downey Jr. became Tony Stark in 2008, ‘Shaun of the Dead’, ‘Hot Fuzz’, and ‘Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World’ filmmaker Edgar Wright was developing a live-action adaptation of Marvel Comics size-shifting superhero Ant-Man. When the Marvel Cinematic Universe became a thing, Kevin Feige and the House of Ideas incorporated Wright’s passion project into the world that they were building and set the film to cap off Phase Two following the likes of ‘Captain America: The Winter Soldier’, ‘Guardians of the Galaxy’, and ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’.
As production moved along though, it seemed that the writer/director’s vision for Scott Lang didn’t match up with the studio’s and Wright ended up leaving the project. However, despite that devastating blow, some are saying that this is the best possible thing that could have happened since his latest film ‘Baby Driver’ is being touted as one of his best movies to date. But as he promotes the acclaimed action film starring Ansel Elgort, Kevin Spacey, Lily James, Jon Bernthal, and Jon Hamm, he has been reflecting a bit about his time in the MCU.
During his appearance on Variety’s Playback podcast, Wright discussed having to walk away from one of his dream projects. He was very cordial about the past events and laid out the whole situation respectfully. Although, you could definitely get a feel for how hard that time was for him:
“The most diplomatic answer is I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie. I was the writer-director on it and then they wanted to do a draft without me, and having written all my other movies, that’s a tough thing to move forward. Suddenly becoming a director for hire on it, you’re sort of less emotionally invested and you start to wonder why you’re there, really.”
While speaking to Uproxx, he even revealed that he has kept his distance since Peyton Reed came on as the new director. Not only has Wright not seen the movie, but he hasn’t even seen trailers or other previews:
“I haven’t seen it and I haven’t even seen the trailer…The closest I came to it was that somebody sitting near me on a flight was watching it. And when I saw that the person sitting next to me was going to watch the movie, I thought, hmm, maybe I’m going to do some work on my laptop.”
This whole thing is such a bummer. Based on the test footage that Wright and Marvel premiered at San Diego Comic-Con back in the day, it looked like he had incredible plans for ‘Ant-Man’. Not to say that Reed’s version was bad or that the upcoming sequel ‘Ant-Man and the Wasp’ would have been considerably different, but it’s crazy to imagine what could have been. Oh well. At least the filmmaker is still making amazing movies and maybe one day he’ll finally get to tackle an iconic superhero on the big screen.
