When a filmmaker toils as diligently and for as long on a project as Edgar Wright did Marvel’s Ant-Man, one would hope that something would come of it. Though the director eventually left the superhero blockbuster after disagreeing with script changes the studio implemented, his creative vision for the movie was an exciting one, and Marvel was almost certainly aware of that when Wright exited.
Though Peyton Reed has since replaced Wright, and Adam McKay rewrote the script, Marvel head honcho Kevin Feige recently reported that Reed’s Ant-Man would retain some of the DNA from the Wright take written by him and Joe Cornish. Now, he’s gone a step further, confirming that some of the visuals created by Wright when he storyboarded the whole movie will in fact make it into the Reed version:
“Yeah. It wasn’t the whole movie and there are new elements in the movie obviously, now, that [Wright] was not involved in. But there are some segments that are awesome and will be brought to life in some incarnation. Peyton [Reed] certainly has all that material and is a talented enough and a secure enough guy to notice if something is really cool and go “No reason to change that, that’s great.” Or if he’s got his own spin on something to go and adapt it from there.”
I’m not sure how to feel about those comments. Sure, there’s a part of me that’s tremendously excited to see even snippets of Wright’s vision play out on the big screen, but that Feige is fine incorporating bits and pieces without Wright at the helm feels wrong on another level.
Hopefully the splicing of Wright and Reed’s ideas for the movie will yield a terrific final product (Marvel hasn’t truly let fans down yet, and it would be downright tragic for a film as pivotal to launching the MCU in a new direction as Ant-Man to be the one that drops the ball), but fans will surely always question whether a Wright version would have been a better movie, and I can’t blame them. With Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy under his belt, Wright is beloved for a reason.
Ant-Man opens July 17th, 2015.