It’s now a year until "Ant-Man" rolls into theaters, and so begins Marvel‘s long campaign of winning over fanboys still not pleased that Edgar Wright, who had been with the project for years, was forced to bow out after creative clashes with the studio. And that’s not all, as Marvel will also have to convince the die hard faithful that Peyton Reed, primarily known for comedies like "Bring It On" and "Yes Man," is the right guy to sit in the saddle and see the movie through. Well, there has been no better advocate and visionary for Marvel movies than Kevin Feige, and he’s pumped about the Reed and what that means for "Ant-Man."
Chatting with IGN, the first thing Feige wants to make clear is that Reed is someone he has looked at before to direct superhero tentpoles. "Peyton is someone that I’ve been a fan of for a long time. People may not remember, though probably your readers remember, that he was attached to ‘Fantastic Four’ more than 10 years ago. We spent a lot of time together… and I got along with Peyton very, very well and he had awesome ideas and an awesome vision for the movie, and for various reasons he ended up leaving that movie…," Feige said.
And Feige takes it further, positioning Reed as the person to fulfill the potential of "Ant-Man." "It’s still very much in the spirit of what Edgar’s original pitch was and the entire template of the movie is what Edgar set out and originally came and pitched us maybe eight years ago now. But it’s on its way to being the absolute best version of what that movie could have been," Feige stated.
That’s certainly a bold pronouncement, but it probably should be couched that Reed is going to deliver the best version of "Ant-Man"… that the studio wants. Clearly, whatever Wright pitched back in the day was great until it didn’t meet whatever new vision Disney or Marvel had for "Ant-Man," so it will be curious to see how this all shakes out. The pressure is on for Reed with "Ant-Man" hitting cinemas on July 17, 2015.
