Now that “Ant-Man” has a director in Peyton Reed (“Bring It On,” “Down With Love“), with Adam McKay rewriting the script, the saga over Edgar Wright‘s sudden departure is over, right? Wrong. His exit still looms large over the movie, and likely will for a while, until he officially weighs in on what happened, or Marvel steps out from their string of press releases to talk about it. Until then, the rumor mill will continue to churn.
And so, the word thus far is that Wright bailed on the movie when Marvel essentially took the script and tossed it to some in house writers to bring it closer to what they wanted (read the full story here). Wright hated the result and bailed on the movie, leaving Marvel to scramble to find a substitute. But what exactly were those requested changes?
Well, we’ve heard Marvel wanted a less morally complex hero (the fact that he was a thief probably didn’t help) and more ties to the Marvel-verse, but these latest rumors suggest a couple of other theories. According to a writer formerly of What Would Tyler Durden Do (so yes, take source with grain of salt), Disney wanted greater product placement and that part of Wright’s reason for leaving was that he wasn’t going to be given the control he wanted over those in-movie ads.
Something about that posit makes little sense to us. Neither Marvel or Disney have exercised a vast amount of product placement to date, and it makes little to no sense in the Marvel movies when the brand being promoted are the comic book heroes themselves. In fact, Disney doesn’t need to sell products in their movies, but the product they are selling are the characters themselves which they make a mint from in licensing. But this next rumor does have a bit more logic behind it.
Over at AICN, they write “a high premium was placed on current cultural references” at Marvel (evidently one included Lang being a driver at the “pink mustache” car service Lyft). And given the hire of McKay to punch up the script, we could see that being true. It could also be the kind of thing to make a character that most mainstream audiences aren’t familiar with a bit more relatable.
Either way, whatever we see on screen won’t be the script that Wright and Joe Cornish had penned. But Simon Pegg has read it and tweeted his mourning (see below) for what could have been. Which leads us to ask: when is the original screenplay going to leak? If Quentin Tarantino‘s barely distributed “The Hateful Eight” managed to worm its way online, we’d say it’s only a matter of time until “Ant-Man” does too. And then fans can truly read for themselves the disconnect between Wright’s vision and final result. [via FilmDrunk/AV Club]