Yesterday evening, when we should have been getting patriotic-drunk on cans of beer with American flags on them, we were instead bummed out, because one of our favorite directors, Edgar Wright, “parted ways” from the Ant-Man movie, due out July 17, 2015. Somehow, Wright and Paul Rudd being attached to the project made it OK to be excited for something called ANT-MAN, but now he’s gone, and all Marvel would say is, “The decision to move on is amicable.” Well, maybe not so much.
This comes from the typically reliable Latino Review:
About 3 months ago, Marvel had notes. The meat of the notes were about the core morality of the piece, must include franchise characters. etc., These notes came from the big four at Marvel. Joe Cornish and Edgar Wright did two drafts to try and answer the notes without compromising their vision.
6 weeks ago Marvel took the script off them and gave the writing assignment to two very low credit writers. One of the writers were from Marvel’s in house writing team. Edgar stayed cool, agreed to stay on the project, and read the draft.
The script came in this week and was completely undone. Poorer, homogenized, and not Edgar’s vision. Edgar met with Marvel on Friday to formally exit and the announcement went out directly after.
Edgar & Joe were upset by the sudden, out of nowhere lack of faith in them as filmmakers. Fiege had always batted for them but this felt like it came from the higher ups. (Via)
Well, that’s a bummer, though I appreciate Wright’s integrity and not letting his vision be stomped like an ant under a shoe. Considering the numerous re-writes and all the other behind-the-scenes drama, it’s getting harder to believe Ant-Man is going to be good, unless it’s 90 minutes of this.