Edgar Wright’s departure from Marvel Studios’ first Ant-Man picture is a 2010s media phenomenon that will live on in the hearts of geeks everywhere. He had earlier been engaged as the film’s writer-director, and there was considerable anticipation surrounding his interpretation of the role.
People did enjoy Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. After an astonishing eight years of work on the picture, Wright departed the production in May 2014, and Peyton Reed took over as director. Many fans interpreted Wright’s departure from the movie as proof that the MCU would not support distinctive directors like Wright.
Edgar Wright discussed his exit from the Ant-Man movie and the discussion surrounding it on Joshua Horowitz’s Happy Sad Confused podcast. He stated, “The reason why I wanted to do [Ant-Man] in the first place was because I was inspired by the people who had got to do the first of something, and kind of set the pace,” he said. “When [Tim Burton’s Batman] came out, it was both the biggest movie of the year by far, and also so idiosyncratic and specific to Tim Burton… Without going into the weeds and without breaking my NDA, the sort of the reason I had to walk away from Ant-Man is because by the time I had started doing it, which was kind of eight years after I had started writing it, now, there was a formula.”
He furthermore added, “And not just in terms of continuity within the movies, not just the movies themselves and the stories, but also like a house style and a look and a way of shooting things. And sort of all the things that are less interesting to me where, on these movies there’s a lot of second unit stuff, there’s like a VFX unit, so I knew I couldn’t make that movie in the same way that I had made Scott Pilgrim vs. the World”
As Wright notes, the reason Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman film is so popular is that it seems as much like a Tim Burton film as it does like a Batman film. Wright left the project entirely after realising that he would not be able to accomplish something comparable to the first Ant-Man film in the MCU, even though he was still listed as a writer and some of his work was included in the final result.
