Despite my best efforts, I am unable to figure out who Patrick Wilson will be playing for “Ant-Man,” directed by Edgar Wright from a script by Wright and Joe Cornish.
With many of the Marvel movies, it is a simple process of elimination. If you're at all familiar with the property, then you can guess who's playing what, but in this case, Wright and Cornish are doing something that is not going to be building off of any one particular storyline or even era of the comic. They're taking some characters people know and building a very different story around them that also now folds into the ongoing story that the larger Marvel movie universe has been telling for the last five or six years.
Patrick Wilson is joining the cast in what has ben described as “the last big role still open,” and I have no idea who he could be. I'm hearing that Michael Douglas will be shown in action in the past, and even with digital technology, I'm guessing Douglas won't actually play those parts in flashback. Instead, they'll have to use someone else to play Yellowjacket at the height of his spy days. Could that be the part that Wilson will play? It would be an interesting way of setting up a very different franchise than anything else Marvel's got going right now.
Or is Wilson playing a present-day role? I like the idea of him joining the Marvel Universe, but I hope it's not a one-off. If he's an antagonist in the film, I hope he's someone who can come back in future films. He joins a very intriguing cast, including Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, Michael Douglas as Hank Pym, and Michael Pena reportedly playing a villain who Pym faces in the '60s flashbacks.
There were also reports that Evangeline Lilly was up for a part in the film, and I'm not sure if that's come together or not.
In short, this remains one of the most mysterious of the Marvel films, and yet one of the most exciting as well. Wright has clearly established that his voice rings through loud and clear in every film he makes and seeing that vision brought to bear on the already well-established Marvel Universe make this one of the films we are most curious about currently in production.
“Ant-Man” arrives in theaters July 17, 2015.