It was just announced in a joint statement by Marvel Studios and director Edgar Wright, that he would no longer be working on the much anticipated Ant-Man.
This is super disappointing, mainly because the primary reason the majority of us (“us” being geeks) were looking forward to it was to see what Edgar Wright was going to do with the property. We really aren’t that interested in the character, an admittedly tough one to get excited about. In the comics he has pretty much, at least recently, ended up being humorless and defined by his anger issues. Anger issues that were much more terrifying than the Hulk’s.
According to Variety:
The decision to move on is amicable, they added, and does not impact the release date on July 17, 2015. The film had originally been dated for Nov. 6, 2015.
Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas and Evangeline Lilly star in the film, with Corey Stoll, Michael Pena and Patrick Wilson.
The next days will see the internet fill up with rumors and speculation on what happened, but one thing we can be sure of – the dreaded creative differences are to blame. In this case it was probably Edgar realizing life was too short to spend 8 years working on a project that was slowly changing from something that he thought would be a blast to make and could slip under the radar, in to a project that is expected to threaten an $80M opening weekend and Kevin Feige’s massive shoulders and ball cap looming expectantly over him with a clipboard full of financial ledgers sporting Disney ears that show precisely how much they cannot mess this up.
It will be interesting to see who they get to take the reins on this, though, screenwriter Joe Cornish (Attach the Block, Adventures of Tintin) wouldn’t be a bad choice.