When the news broke that Edgar Wright was off Marvel’s Ant-Man, it came as quite a shock because his hiring was so well-received. And when the split happened, a couple of Marvel’s most esteemed filmmakers tried their best to stay in line with the studio that was giving them great success while also expressing support for Wright. Fans will remember that one of those filmmakers was Joss Whedon, who has delicately spoken about the situation while promoting Avengers: Age of Ultron but has certainly made his frustration known. Most recently, he spoke with BuzzFeed and addressed it again, explaining why the split was such a let-down: the great script.
Apparently, Whedon read the Ant-Man script written by Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish. And it was awesome. And Whedon wasn’t even into Ant-Man — before he read the script that Wright was going to shoot.
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.
A new draft was written by the movie’s star Paul Rudd, who said that the ordeal was an “emotional rollercoaster,” and Adam McKay, in whom Marvel has expressed a deep, deep interest for future projects. It’s not that fans shouldn’t trust Rudd and McKay just because they aren’t Wright and Cornish… but we’re just always going to wonder, especially given Whedon’s enthusiasm. Because he doesn’t generally get very enthusiastic.
So we may never know what fans have been denied. The best we can do is try not to think about what could have been when Ant-Man hits theaters on July 17 and hope that what we have will be better than a consolation prize.
