Some directors — very few, when it comes down to it — are terrifyingly prolific. Steven Soderbergh, Michael Winterbottom, Woody Allen — all of them seem to make pretty much a film a year like clockwork, and sometimes even more than that. But given scheduling issues, financing problems, and, for the very best directors, the time it takes to actually get a script right, the vast majority of filmmakers end up making a film every three or four years if they're lucky. This can make the wait between films agonizing for fans of a director.
And so it's been for followers of Edgar Wright — three years between "Shaun of the Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" and another three between that and "Scott Pilgrim vs. the World." And until recently, we've been worried that the gap might be even longer before the director was on our screens again: nearly two years have passed since his 2010 pop-art masterpiece, with no news of what film might come next. Until last week, anyway. It was finally revealed that Wright was planning a September shoot for "The World's End," his third film co-written with Simon Pegg, and the closer to what's sometimes been called "The Cornetto trilogy," a project that would revolve around friends on a pub crawl together. But is it possible that Wright might be rolling on not one, but two projects this year?
The helmer was on the Empire podcast to promote his excellent, crowd-sourced web series "Brandon Generator," and when the questions turned to "Ant-Man" he responded, "Things are happening, and other things are happening on other things as well. There’s some interesting plates spinning and I ideally hope I’ll be shooting this year." Now, this would seem to suggest that "Ant-Man," not "The World's End," would be before cameras in 2012. Bearing in mind the interview was recorded a few weeks back, before the more recent announcement, SlashFilm emailed the filmmaker to check what the situation actually was, and the answer was… interesting.
The director told the site "So as not to jinx things, I am going to remain spectacularly vague on this. Let’s just say I hope to shoot some Antman & World’s End this year." What could this mean, given that "The World's End" is aiming for a September shoot. Has "Ant-Man" been secretly gearing up to get before cameras in the next few weeks? Would Wright be hopping between the sets? Perhaps some kind of Hank Pym-themed coda for "Iron Man 3?"
Almost certainly none of the above, we'd say, although the third option is the most plausible. We'd suspect it means that, because of the juxtaposition of scale inherent in the property, which will require complex visual effects, some kind of test shoot, or even shooting plates or characters to be blown up/shrunk down for later use, is planned to take place before the end of 2012, with further photography to take place afterwards. But the big news here is that it seems to be that "Ant-Man" will follow "The World's End," and follow it quite sharpish, perhaps helping to explain why Deadline originally listed the latter as aiming for a Spring 2013 release; the sooner Wright finishes on it, the sooner he can start on the Marvel project, which seems to have beaten "Baby Driver" and "The Night Stalker" to be the director's project-after-next. We're sure confirmation will be on its way before too long. Perhaps an announcement around Comic-Con time?…
