What Ever Happened To Edgar Wright's Ant-Man Movie?
For at least a decade, the British filmmaker was Marvel Studios' only choice of director to make Ant-Man. At the eleventh hour before production began, it all fell apart.
It all happened so long ago that you’d be forgiven for forgetting that Edgar Wright almost directed an Ant-Man movie for Marvel Studios1.
Which, when you think about it, boggles the mind. No director has been better suited for a comic book film than Edgar Wright— *cough* Scott Pilgrim vs. The World *cough*— and it’s actually astonishing that he still hasn’t. Maybe once the uncertainty over the Paramount-Warner Brothers merger is resolved— or you know, once the merger is STOPPED— James Gunn can convince the British filmmaker to take a stab at a DC Comics property2.
So here’s the million-dollar question: how in the world were we deprived of Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man eleven years ago— and why?
Four important things happened in the first half of the 2000s where Marvel Studios and Edgar Wright were concerned:
In 2000, Marvel struck a deal with Artisan Entertainment (the company behind 1999’s money-minting The Blair Witch Project) to make film and TV adaptations out of Marvel’s lesser-known characters, including:
Captain America
Thor (earmarked as a TV show)
Black Panther (Wesley Snipes was already attached to produce and star)
Ant-Man (a superhero who can shrink to the size of an insect).
Around that time, Wright— still an unknown British TV director— was in Los Angeles and had a meeting with Artisan. Learning that he was a Marvel Comics fan, Artisan hired him and Joe Cornish to pitch and write a script for Ant-Man.
In 2003, Artisan is bought by Lionsgate Entertainment and the Marvel/Artisan deal is scuttled. Lionsgate lets all the rights to the Marvel characters revert to the comics company.
In 2004, Wright visits San Diego Comic-Con around July to screen Shaun of the Dead (it had already released in the UK, but was only scheduled to open in the United States in September) and takes a meeting with Avi Arad and Kevin Feige, who—along with David Maisel— were building a nascent Marvel Studios. “Weirdly enough, I did something for you,” Wright told them. “Do you want to read the thing that we did three years ago?” Arad and Feige knew nothing about the pitch, so Wright gave them a copy. The two were impressed enough that Feige held onto the treatment; and when Marvel Studios got money to make its own feature films, Ant-Man was on the short list of films it wanted to make.
“I said that I always was a Marvel Comics kid. And they said, ‘Are you interested in any of these titles?’ The one that jumped out was Ant-Man, because I had the John Byrne Marvel Premiere #47 from 1979 that David Michelinie had done with Scott Lang that was kind of an origin story. I always loved the artwork, so when I saw that, it just immediately set bells going off.” - Edgar Wright
With their treatment, Wright and Cornish did something that hadn’t been done in superhero movies at the time: They took two different characters using the name Ant-Man and brought them into one film3. Ant-Man’s lack of powers— beyond the shrinking and communicating with ants through the tech— appealed to Wright. He said:
There’s no supernatural element, there’s no gamma rays. It’s just, like, the suit and the gas. We could do something high-concept, really visual, cross-genre, sort of an action and special-effects bonanza, but funny as well.
The proposed story operated in the vein of a heist film, loosely adapted from ‘To Steal an Ant-Man’, Wright’s favorite story from Marvel Premiere #47. It opened with a flashback to the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym (in the comics, he was also a founding member of the Avengers), then jumped forward to the present day to Scott Lang, a thief who steals the Ant-Man suit from Pym.
Artisan rejected the treatment. They’d wanted something more along the lines of family-friendly entertainment like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.
But Feige and Arad decided to move ahead with Ant-Man. So as soon as Wright finished Hot Fuzz, he and Cornish sat down and turned their treatment into a screenplay for Marvel.
In 2006, Wright and Feige returned to San Diego Comic Con; Wright was doing a panel for Hot Fuzz, while Feige was hosting the first Marvel Studios panel and trying to drum up interest for their upcoming films: Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. Marvel convinced Wright to join Feige onstage to announce Ant-Man, during which Feige hinted at the still-to-be-named Marvel Cinematic Universe: “If you listen to all the characters that I name that we are working on currently and you put them all together, there’s no coincidence that they may someday equal the Avengers.”
The room for the 2006 Marvel Studios panel was half-empty. As one fan recalled: “Absolutely nobody cared. Everybody was trying to get into the Spider-Man 3 panel instead. They had an Iron Man teaser poster signing with Jon Favreau and they practically couldn’t give them away.”
Oh, how the times have changed…
Two years later, Wright and Cornish delivered their completed Ant-Man script. But back at Marvel Studios, things had changed dramatically in a short time.
Avi Arad, whom Wright had met, was out. Feige was now head of production. Most unexpected of all: Iron Man turned out to be a such a game-changer that the fledgling studio changed its strategy. The initial plan was to experiment with a range of characters to see what worked best— now, however, Marvel Studios greenlit an Iron Man sequel and rapidly set about establishing the identities of S.H.I.E.L.D. (introduced in Iron Man), Thor, and Captain America that led to an Avengers movie. Still, they wanted to make Ant-Man with Wright, so they commissioned another script draft.
But both the company and Wright had more pressing priorities: The Avengers (sans Ant-Man) for Marvel Studios, and Scott Pilgrim for Wright.
As a result, the next screenplay revision was only ready by 2011, because Wright was occupied and so was Joe Cornish, who’d made his directorial debut with Attack the Block. At this point, a decade had passed since Wright pitched Artisan his Ant-Man treatment, and a lot had changed in that time: Wright had made his stamp as an ambitious auteur with an unmistakably distinctive style, and Marvel Studios had tightened its creative control to ensure a cohesive vision. The two were soon about to find out what happened when an unstoppable force met an immovable object.
But not yet.
Marvel Studios liked the latest Ant-Man script— it was still a heist movie about Pym and Lang trying to keep the Ant-Man suit and tech away from a villain with nefarious intentions, but sleeker— and were keen to include Ant-Man in its MCU Phase Two, as one of the movies leading up to Avengers: Age of Ultron.
In June 2012, while The Avengers tore up the box office, Marvel Studios paid Wright to film a day of test footage of Ant-Man (played by a stuntman) battling two men in a hallway, shrinking and growing as he fights. Feige smelled a promotional opportunity, and took the footage to 2012 San Diego Comic Con. This time, the Marvel Studios hall was packed.
And the audience loved the footage. Wright himself turned up, brandishing an issue of Marvel Premiere #47—the comic that inspired the script—and spoke about the test footage that had been screened: “I shot a little test, because when I say ‘little test’ it was genuinely to test what it looks like when he’s little.”
It would be the only footage that Wright would ever shoot for Ant-Man.
Something happened before the 2012 Comic Con. Eric Fellner, the cofounder and co-chair of Working Title— who was instrumental in getting Wright’s films made— was diagnosed with cancer. He disclosed his illness when Wright turned in the script for The World’s End, the third film in the Cornetto trilogy. The news changed everything. Wright says:
[Eric Fellner] was our knight in shining armor on Shaun of the Dead. I felt [that] if we didn’t make [The World’s End] and something terrible happened, I would never forgive myself.
Indeed, it was Fellner who picked up Shaun of the Dead after the project fell apart when the original production company, Film4, downsized. Funnily enough, Wright turned down Working Title to go with Film4 before Fellner stepped in. Wright informed Marvel Studios that while he still wanted to make Ant-Man, he needed to make The World’s End first out of loyalty to Fellner. He recalled,
“To Marvel’s credit, Kevin Feige and Louis D’Esposito said they understood. ‘We’ll see you in a couple of years,’ they said.”4
When Wright returned in 2013, ready to make Ant-Man at last, he discovered that things at Marvel Studios had changed even more in that short time.
“[Ant-Man] is pretty standalone in the way we’re linking it to the others. I want to put the crazy premise of it into a real world, which is why I think Iron Man really works.” – Edgar Wright
The days of experimentation and improvisation at Marvel Studios that cooked up Iron Man were over. There was a template now, but mostly, there was a process— and it involved a lot of discussion, a lot of feedback, and— more disconcertingly— a lot of oversight. Wright was getting notes not just from Feige, but from Avengers director and unofficial Marvel steward Joss Whedon5, as well as the Creative Committee in New York.
Still, Wright got to work. He cast Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, liking his mix of comedic timing, charm, and vulnerability; Patrick Wilson as police officer Jim Paxton and Lang’s ex-wife’s fiancé; Michael Douglas as Hank Pym; and a raft of other names. Evangeline Lilly was in negotiations to play Hope van Dyne. Wright also assembled a trusted crew of department heads with whom he’d previously collaborated, including production designer Marcus Rowland and cinematographer Bill Pope. Was there some friction between Wright’s personnel and Marvel’s in-house staffers? Sure. Each had their own working methods, but it was nothing too serious that could not be resolved. What was, however, becoming increasingly difficult to resolve were the barrage of notes that never seemed to end.
The biggest issue that the Creative Committee harped on was continuity. Wright and Cornish’s script was written before the MCU; now they had to integrate it with the expanding universe. Wouldn’t S.H.I.E.L.D. have contacted Hank Pym if he’d been an active superhero in the past? Wouldn’t Pym have crossed paths with Howard Stark, Tony’s father, a founding member of S.H.I.E.L.D.?
The writers were happy to accommodate revisions that helped connect Ant-Man to the wider MCU, but they were adamant about maintaining the tone of the script. The flood of notes reached such a point that in March 2014, Wright and the Committee postponed the Ant-Man production to July to sort out script issues.
What Wright didn’t know, though, was that Marvel Studios had handed off the Ant-Man script to in-house writers who did a pass that addressed all the Committee’s notes6. In mid-May, Wright received the new draft— and he was horrified. Though the story was still the same, entire swaths of dialogue had been rewritten and references to the MCU shoehorned in.
For Wright, this was the last straw. The director thought that he and Cornish had been working in good faith with Marvel Studios to find a common ground, only for that trust to be betrayed.
On May 23rd, Marvel Studios and Wright released an announcement: the two were parting ways “due to differences in their vision of the film”. Most of Wright’s chosen department heads left with him, partly because they realized that the movie was not going to start shooting as planned in July, and partly out of loyalty to Wright7.
On Twitter, Wright posted— then deleted— a Photoshopped image of a sad-faced Buster Keaton holding a Cornetto ice cream. If you know your film history, it’s easy to interpret the meaning: Keaton was an independent director who lost his creative control after the costly misfire of The General (1926) and forced to work eventually with big film studios like MGM where he constantly clashed with them and had to make compromises to his artistic vision that he always regretted.
Joss Whedon tweeted a photo holding up a Cornetto in solidarity. He was confused as anyone by the abrupt departure and said at the time: “I thought the script was not only the best script that Marvel had ever had, but the most Marvel script I’d read. I had no interest in Ant-Man. I read the script, and was like, ‘Of course! This is so good!’”
Later, Feige would say this about the split:
I wish it wasn’t as late in the day as it was, but it just had become clear that there was an impasse that we had never reached before. We’ve worked with lots of unbelievably talented filmmakers like Edgar before, and of course there are disagreements along the way. We had always found a way around it, a way to battle through it and emerge on the other side with a better product. It just became clear that both of us was [sic] just being too polite over the past eight years, I guess! Then it was clear that, ‘Oh you’re really not gonna stop talking about that note?’ ‘Oh, you’re really not gonna do that note?’ Alright, this isn’t working.
A few years later, Wright tried to be polite about what went wrong: “I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie.”
The departure was a “really heartbreaking decision” for Wright after “having worked on it for so long.” He said:
I was the writer-director on [Ant-Man] 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 thinking if I do one of these movies I would like to be the writer-director. 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.
The unstoppable force had met an immovable object. And the casualty was that we never got an Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man movie.
“I think the most defining difference between the two scripts was that Edgar’s didn’t take itself as seriously.” – Evangeline Lilly
Marvel postponed Ant-Man until they got things in order. Meanwhile, Paul Rudd called in his friend, Anchorman director Adam McKay, who recalled:
[Rudd] called me when Edgar Wright stepped away from the project and told me what was going on. I was a little dubious just because I’m friends with Edgar and I didn’t know what the story was, and then when I kind of heard what happened, that Edgar had parted ways, and then I saw their materials. I was like, ‘God, this is pretty cool.’ Ultimately I didn’t want to jump in as a director—I had too many other projects going and it was too tight—but I thought, ‘You know what, I can rewrite this, and I can do a lot of good by rewriting it.’
While Marvel searched for a new director, McKay and Rudd bunkered down in different hotel rooms and hammered out a rewrite. According to McKay:
It was like six to eight weeks: we just ground it out and did a giant rewrite of the script. I was really proud of what we did. I really thought we put some amazing stuff in there and built on an already strong script from Edgar Wright.
Some of the changes included expanding Evangeline Lilly’s character, Hope Van Dyne, establishing a more complicated daughter-father relationship with Hank Pym and more action scenes. This compelled Lilly to sign on— when Wright left, she hadn’t finalized her contract and had been debating whether to stay or go. “I think everyone was a little uncomfortable because we all loved Edgar and were very passionate to work with him,” she said.
McKay and Rudd also appeased the Creative Committee by inserting a flashback sequence for Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) and adding a sequence in which Ant-Man faced off with the Falcon (Anthony Mackie) on the new Avengers Compound. Oh yeah, the schedule was shuffled so that Ant-Man now took place after Age of Ultron. Rudd insists, though, that the story remains Wright’s and Cornish’s—who received final screenplay credit alongside McKay and Rudd.
Said Rudd:
The idea, the trajectory, the goal, and the blueprint of it all, is really Edgar and Joe. It’s their story. We changed some scenes, we added new sequences, we changed some characters, we added new characters. If you took the two scripts and held them up together they’d be very different—but the idea is all theirs.
Wright and Cornish received final screenplay credit alongside McKay and Rudd.
Feige finally selected Peyton Reed to helm the movie; the director was willing on the condition that Marvel pushed back production by one month to give him enough time to get himself oriented and to replace the department heads who’d left with Wright.
Peyton later revealed that he and Wright exchanged emails: “We both acknowledged the general weirdness of the situation. It’s all very odd, but it’s been really nice to communicate with him.”
Insiders say that Wright’s animatics and storyboards were still used for the action sequences. One scene that did remain from the Wright and Cornish script was a battle between a miniaturized Ant-Man and Yellowjacket on a child’s train table with Thomas the Tank Engine barreling toward them, a moment prominently highlighted in the trailers. Reed did add his own contributions, such as bringing the Quantum Realm into the final act— he said that it was never in the early drafts— as well as the gag of Michael Peña’s character Luis recounting a story with him voicing every line of dialogue.
When Ant-Man finally opened on July 17, 2015—nearly a decade after Wright met Kevin Feige and Avi Arad— it did respectable business, grossing $519 million worldwide, and was received positively, if a little mutedly. For fans of Edgar Wright and those who knew the changes behind the scenes, it was a little difficult to watch the film and not imagine what could’ve been.
But don’t feel too bad for Edgar Wright. After exiting Ant-Man, he turned to making his 20-year-old passion project, Baby Driver, which also did respectable business. Still, it does make you wonder what Ant-Man might’ve been like if Edgar Wright had been given a chance to make it his way.
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Long live the movies!
D.L. Holmes
What do you mean it was only ten years ago?! *looks at research notes* Oh, right, 2015 was ten years ago.
Personally, I think Edgar Wright should take a stab at an Elastic Man, Power Girl, or a Justice League Dark movie. Not because he’s unsuitable for the Trinity properties (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman), but because these characters are not as well-known to the general public, so he can put his own stamp on them like James Gunn did with Guardians of the Galaxy.
Batman Beyond is the only one I can think of that did this, but that was over on TV and in animation.
To the credit of Feige and D’Esposito, they did something similar for Ryan Coogler when Chadwick Boseman unexpectedly passed away, checking in on the director to make sure he was okay and to let him know that if he chose not to make a Black Panther sequel, they would accept the decision. Luckily, Fellner’s treatment worked and he beat the cancer during production of The World’s End.
Said stewardship ended after Avengers: Age of Ultron especially after Whedon publicly aired his grievances with Marvel over the making of the sequel.
Sources indicate that the rewrites had been done by Dave Callaham (Shang-Chi, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) and Eric Pearson (Agent Carter).
Another casualty was Patrick Wilson, who left the projects because he had other commitments that fall.