After the shock departure of Edgar Wright following years of development on Ant-Man, Marvel Studios brought in Peyton Reed (The Break-Up) as his replacement in the director’s chair, while Adam McKay (Anchorman) also signed on to rework the script by Wright and his writing partner Joe Cornish (Attack the Block). Filming on the Phase Three movie is now of course well underway, and Collider has caught up with McKay, who has spoken about his work on the film, as well as how much of Wright’s original script has made it through to the final product. Here’s what he had to say:
“[Paul Rudd] called me when Edgar Wright stepped away from the project and told me what was going on. I went and met with Marvel, and I was a little dubious just because I’m friends with Edgar and I didn’t know what the story was, and then when I kind of heard what happened, that Edgar had parted ways, and then I saw their materials, I was like, ‘God this is pretty cool’. Ultimately I didn’t want to jump in as a director, I had too many other projects going and it was too tight, but I thought, ‘You know what, I can rewrite this, and I can do a lot of good by rewriting it.’
“I really thought we put some amazing stuff in there and built on an already strong script from Edgar Wright and sort of just enhanced some stuff. We added some new action beats. I grew up on Marvel Comics so the geek in me was in heaven that I got to add a giant action sequence to the movie; I was so excited. So we did, we added some cool new action… “There’s a lot that’s already in there from what Edgar did, there’s a lot of dialogue and character still in there. “We just shaped the whole thing, we just tried to streamline it, make it cleaner, make it a little bigger, a little more aggressive, make it funnier in places—we just basically did a rewrite. Edgar had a really good script. But we just had a blast, and Rudd was just so much fun to write with. I walked away saying, ‘Hey, you and I gotta write a script together.'”
Ant-Man is set for release on July 17th , 2015, with Peyton Reed (The Break-Up) directing a cast that includes Paul Rudd (I Love You Man) as Scott Lang, Michael Douglas (Behind The Candelabra) as Dr. Hank Pym, Evangeline Lilly (The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug) as Hope Van Dyne, Corey Stoll (House of Cards) as Darren Cross / Yellowjacket, John Slattery (Iron Man 2) as Howard Stark and Bobby Cannavale (The Long Play), Michael Peña (American Hustle), Abby Ryder Fortson (Togetherness), Judy Greer (Dawn of the Planet of the Apes), David Dastmalchian (The Dark Knight), Wood Harris (The Wire), Gregg Turkington (The Comedy) and T.I. (American Gangster) in as yet-unrevealed roles.
Originally published October 18, 2014. Updated April 12, 2018.
