Everybody’s spent the past week buzzing about it — why did director Edgar Wright bail on Marvel’s Ant-Man?
While the Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz auteur has been conspicuously quiet on the subject so far (except for a since-deleted Twitter pic rife with subtext of individual vs. studio creative control), various reports have started assembling some context around the shocking move.
And if last weekend’s report by Latino Review, followed by Wednesday’s piece in the Hollywood Reporter (re-reported by Crave film site SuperHeroHype) are any indication, the reasons are just as troubling as Marvel fans thought they were.
Confirming LR’s assessment, the Hollywood Reporter piece by Kim Masters and Borys Kit claims the final straw in the long-simmering tensions between Wright and the studio came to a head last week after the director read a re-write of his script co-authored with Joe Cornish — a re-write that had no input from the famously idiosyncratic director.
Wright balked at the changes and promptly bowed out of the project he’d been developing with Marvel since 2006.
HR also reported the film’s June 2 production start date was delayed earlier this year after Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige was unhappy with the shape of the Wright-Cornish script and ordered the re-write. Compounding Marvel’s problem, HR reported that Ant-Man‘s key crew members — heads of the production’s various departments — also walked off the project earlier this month once it became clear the film would not begin shooting as scheduled on the amended start date of July 28.
Despite all the upheaval, Marvel remains steadfast that they will hire a new director shortly and the film will be completed in time for its July 17, 2015 release date.
Obviously, there are two sides to the Wright-Marvel divorce. While the most vocal among Marvel’s Internet fanbase are vilifying the studio, Crave’s William Bibbiani presented some spot-on analysis explaining why Marvel is not entirely at fault for the Ant-Man debacle.
And Bibbs is right — Marvel’s got a now-mighty brand to protect and a fan standard to uphold that further emboldens their license to rein in a decidedly non-mainstream vision like Wright’s.
But at the end of the day, odds are astronomically high that none of this very public split is good for Ant-Man — or the Marvel brand in general.
And just imagine the swelling crescendo of doomsayers if the somewhat experimental Guardians of the Galaxy doesn’t light box offices on fire Aug. 1.
Yikes.
