For months, writer/director Adam McKay has made it very clear that he’s more than interested in returning to work on Ant-Man and the Wasp, the sequel to Marvel’s Ant-Man, a film that he helped write alongside star of the film Paul Rudd. While Marvel has yet to confirm that McKay will definitely be back, during an interview with Nerdist, the Anchorman director offered up some interesting news.
He said, “We’ve been talking to Marvel actually. We just talked to them the other day, and it looks like I will be involved. I don’t know if it’s gonna be right from page one. But it looks like I will definitely be involved. There you go. There’s a little headline for the fanboys!”
A report from last December confirmed that Andrew Barrer, Gabriel Ferrari and Paul Rudd had all closed deals to write the sequel. At the time, it was likely that McKay would be involved in the story stage of the writing process as well, but it was still just a rumor; now, McKay has officially announced his involvement.
McKay has penned and directed some of the funniest comedies of the past decade, including Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby and Step Brothers, so his addition to the Ant-Man and the Wasp writing team probably means that he will inject a bit more humor into the film’s script, as he did with the first one.
As a side note, he also told the outlet about a potential future project that he’s currently working on, saying, “I’m talking with Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly about maybe doing an immigration comedy. I’m trying to crack climate change very, very hard. I have an interesting idea, I think. But it’s got to be a movie that plays. It can’t be didactic or pedantic. It’s got to be… I want to keep an audience on the edge of their seats. So I’m trying to figure that out. But I don’t know. After this, we’ll see where we end up.”
This year, McKay earned his first two Oscar nominations for The Big Short, which has become one of the best reviewed movies of 2015 and is likely to take home the award for Best Adapted Screenplay at the Academy Awards later this month.
Ant-Man and the Wasp is set for release on July 6th 2018.
Originally published February 16, 2016. Updated November 21, 2022.
