By Avengers: Age of Ultron is almost upon us (and in some parts of the world already is), so it’s just about time to start frothing at the mouth over the next big Marvel thing, which happens to be Peyton Reed’s Ant-Man. Before a really great trailer dropped on us a little over a week ago, Ant-Man was best known for writer and director Edgar Wright’s high-profile departure from the project. During an Age of Ultron set visit with Buzzfeed, director Joss Whedon discussed his thoughts on the matter for the first time, saying that he “didn’t get” why Wright and Marvel went their separate ways.
“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. [Then] I read the script, and was like, Of course! This is so good! It reminded me of the books when I read them. Irreverent and funny and could make what was small large, and vice versa.”
“I don’t know where things went wrong. But I was very sad. Because I thought, This is a no-brainer. This is Marvel getting it exactly right. Whatever dissonance that came, whatever it was, I don’t understand why it was bigger than a marriage that seemed so right. But I’m not going to say it was definitely all Marvel, or Edgar’s gone mad! I felt like they would complement each other by the ways that they were different. And, uh, somethin’ happened.”
Even though Marvel has done a lot to restore collective fans’ faith in Ant-Man, both with that trailer and a killer marketing campaign – we’re past the point that we assume the flick will be Marvel’s first large-scale failure. Still, Wright is a great director and his Ant-Man was something looked forward to for years, even predating the concept of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It’s sad to know we live in a universe where that project will never come to fruition and we’ll never get to see it.
Still, it’s fairly amazing that we’re getting an Ant-Man movie at all, and the fact that it looks like it will be halfway decent despite the film’s high-profile problems is nothing short of a miracle. The flick, starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michael Douglas and Corey Stoll, hits theaters on July 17.