Inside 'Ant-Man': From the Director Drama to That Top-Secret Plot
So far, the drama surrounding the pre-production of Marvel’s Ant-Man has garnered a lot more interest than the actual film. The release of the movie’s first trailer on Tuesday evening earned some attention back for the on-screen product, which stars Paul Rudd as the titular miniature hero, but, as the new Entertainment Weekly cover story proves, the behind-the-scenes machinations that saw fanboy favorite director Edgar Wright replaced by comedy vet Peyton Reed is still making waves.
In the story, Marvel movie boss Kevin Feige addresses the rift that caused Wright to split last May after spending nearly a decade developing the project; rumors had it that Marvel changed the script without telling the Cornetto Trilogy director, but Feige denies that ever happened.
“It is true that there were disagreements about the direction the script should take, but everything was aboveboard,” he said. “Everything was done with everybody else’s knowledge. There was a sense of ‘we’re going in this direction, you’re staying in this direction — maybe it’s best that we end as friends.’”
Evangeline Lilly, who plays Hope Van Dyne in the film, refused to sign on the dotted line until she liked the new script. It took months until rewrites by Rudd, Adam McKay (who nearly came in as replacement director), Gabriel Ferrari and Andrew Barrer made it acceptable.
“Marvel knew [that first revised screenplay] wasn’t good,” Lilly revealed. “They just knew it was in the direction they wanted.”
While we may never know what Wright’s version of Ant-Man would have looked like, we do have some new insight into the committee-written, Reed-directed product that will be released on July 17.
Rudd plays Scott Lang, an ex-con who crosses paths with Hank Pym, the inventor of the size-shifting technology played by a marvelously bearded Michael Douglas. Pym needs Lang to throw a wrench in the diabolical plans of Darren Cross (played by Cory Stoll), “a former protégé of Pym’s who has developed his own version of the Ant-Man technology and created the alter ego Yellowjacket.”
When the trailer hit, we wondered about how actively involved Pym would be in the action, and it so far seems that he’ll be right in there with Lang and Van Dyne (who is his estranged daughter) — among other hijinks, they try to steal Cross’s bee-inspired suit.
For more details, head over to the Entertainment Weekly story and watch the trailer below:
