Joss Whedon took pretty much everyone by surprise last month at the San Diego Comic-Con when he announced that the Hank Pym-created artificial intelligence Ultron is to be the main villain in 2015’s eagerly awaited sequel to The Avengers. Of course, with Hank Pym due to make his debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe after The Avengers: Age of Ultron in Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man, this means the bad guy will be getting a new origin (rumours suggest he’ll be created instead by Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark), while it also leaves Ant-Man without an obvious antagonist going forward. However, according to Wright, the creation of Ultron was never part of his plans for the miniature hero.
“It was never in my script,” Wright tells The Huffington Post. “Because even just to sort of set up what Ant-Man does is enough for one movie. It’s why I think Iron Man is extremely successful because it keeps it really simple. You have one sort of — the villain comes from the hero’s technology. It’s simple. So I think why that film really works and why, sometimes, superhero films fail — or they have mixed results — because they have to set up a hero and a villain at the same time. And that’s really tough. And sometimes it’s unbalanced. You know, when I was younger I used to love Tim Burton’s Batman. I was like 15 and even then I was aware, “This is really the Joker’s film.” It’s like, the Joker just takes over and Batman, you really don’t learn too much about him. Comics have years to explain this stuff and in a movie you have to focus on one thing. So it’s about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus. You cannot put 50 years of the Marvel universe into a movie. It’s impossible.”
Who would you like to see as the villain in Ant-Man? Let us know in the comments below…
Originally published August 20, 2013. Updated April 11, 2018.
