We’ve already seen one shrinking superhero on the screen this year in Marvel’s Ant-Man, and with The Atom set to headline The CW’s upcoming Arrow / The Flash spinoff DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, executive producer Phil Klemmer has been speaking about the challenges of bringing Ray Palmer to weekly television, and differentiating him from his Marvel rival.
“The only challenge is how expensive his costume costs, and the danger that we actually injure him doing stunts, because his costume actually costs not just more than a car — more than, like, your average American home — so the scariest thing about Atom is I’m thinking, like, ‘when do you use a digital double, and when do you use Brandon?'” Klemmer tells DCLegendsTV.
“I loved Ant-Man and I love Paul Rudd, and I think he’s a hilarious guy, but to me, they’re just such different people — the fact that they share a crossover of powers,” he continues. “It also helped that I was thinking about Legends of Tomorrow before I ever saw Ant-Man. I mean, if I hadn’t started to write this first, I just never would have seen that, because you don’t want to be contaminated with another pre-existing idea. To me, Ray is a billionaire do-gooder with a secret and Paul Rudd (Scott Lang) is like a wisecracking cat burglar. So aside from the fact that they shrink, I don’t see a whole lot of overlap.”
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow is slated to premiere in 2016, with a cast that includes Brandon Routh (Ray Palmer/The Atom), Victor Garber (Martin Stein/Firestorm), Wentworth Miller (Leonard Snart/Captain Cold), Dominic Purcell (Mick Rory/Heat Wave) and Caity Lotz (Sara Lance/White Canary) alongside Ciara Renee (Law & Order: SVU) as Kendra Saunders/Hawkgirl, Falk Hentschel (Transcendence) as Carter Hall/Hawkman, Arthur Darvill (Doctor Who) as Rip Hunter, Franz Drameh (Attack the Block) as Jay Jackson and Casper Crump (The Killing) as Vandal Savage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszEaHYNDTy5C-cH9Oa2gN5ng&v=8k_v0cVxqEY
Originally published August 24, 2015. Updated April 14, 2018.
