Ant-Man: Edgar Wright left because the MCU didn’t want an auteur film

Edgar Wright’s exit from 2014’s Marvel ‘Ant-Man’ will be reworked again.

Director Wright’s co-writer Joe Cornish revealed that the “Shaun of the Dead” helmer’s “auteur”ism led to Marvel pushing back during pre-production.

“When Edgar and I first met Marvel, they were in offices above a BMW showroom in Beverly Hills,” Cornish said. The playlist. “It was around the time of Ang Lee’s ‘Hulk,’ and (Jon) Favreau hadn’t even started working on the first ‘Iron Man.’ Superhero movies weren’t like… I guess because VFX hadn’t progressed to the point where they could put what was on the page onto the screen. So they always felt like they were reaching for something that they couldn’t reach.”

Cornish continued, “We worked on (Ant-Man) for something like eight years, on and off. And during that time the landscape changed completely. Technology has completely changed. Audiences fell in love with superhero movies. Everything that people loved in the comics in the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, ’80s was suddenly being translated to the screen in a way that had never been seen before.”

He added: “It kind of caught up with us in the sense that Marvel didn’t necessarily want the auteur film that Edgar and I wanted to make because they had this behemoth on their hands at the time. There was this universe where the films had to integrate. Edgar is an author. Edgar Wright makes Edgar Wright movies. In the end, that’s why it didn’t happen, I guess.”

Wright left the film during development in 2014 and was replaced as director by Peyton Reed. Wright and Cornish are still credited with writing the first “Ant-Man” script, along with director Reed and stars Paul Rudd and Adam McKay.

“Ant-Man” was released in 2015 and has received two sequels, with “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” premiering on February 17.

Wright said earlier Species that he and Cornish wanted a stand-alone story similar to “Iron Man” for the first film, rather than relying on the larger MCU.

“I wanted to do a Marvel movie, but I don’t think they really wanted to do an Edgar Wright movie,” Wright said. “I was the writer-director, and then they wanted to do an outline without me, and after I’ve written all my other films, it’s hard to move on, thinking that if I do one of the films, I want to be the writer. -director. When you suddenly become an acting director, you’re less emotionally engaged and start to wonder why you’re there at all.”

Marvel head Kevin Feige told Empire (via Collision) in 2014 that Wright’s departure was “disappointing”. “He was friendly and we sat down in a room and said this is not working. I wish he or I had realized that somewhere in the eight years before that,” Feige said at the time. “I wish the day wasn’t as late as it was, but now it’s clear we’re at a dead end we’ve never reached before. We’ve worked with a lot of incredibly talented filmmakers like Edgar, and of course there are disagreements along the way. We’ve always found a way around it, how to fight through it, and come out the other side with a better product. Now it’s clear that we’ve both been too polite for the past eight years, I think! Then it became clear that “Oh, you’re really not going to stop talking about that note?” “Oh, you’re really not going to remember?” OK, that’s not working.”

Marvel most recently attached horror auteur Sam Raimi to direct “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness,” and Raimi revealed that he occasionally clashed with Feige to insert certain scenes. The film was criticized in part for the continuity errors in the MCU story set up in Disney+’s WandaVision series around Elizabeth Olsen’s Wanda Maximoff/Scarlet Witch character.

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