Released in the shadow of “Avengers: Infinity War” (much like the first film), “Ant-Man And The Wasp,” was nevertheless a summer hit and a nice, playful antidote to the grim seriousness of the ‘Avengers’ epic. Directed by Peyton Reed (“Bring It On,” “The Break-Up,”), the filmmaker inherited the “Ant-Man” franchise under controversial and questionable circumstances—Edgar Wright and Marvel parted ways last minute on his iteration of the superhero movie. With only a few weeks left before production, the screenplay was rewritten by its star Paul Rudd and Adam McKay, and became a modest-sized Marvel hit in the summer of 2015.
Kevin Feige On ‘Ant-Man And The Wasp,’ ‘Black Panther’ And Big Expectations [Interview]
Marvel was plenty pleased with Reed, and he’s put his full stamp on “Ant-Man & The Wasp,” the sequel which sets the first female superhero as the co-lead of a Marvel film. The film ups the scale, but keeps the humor and family intimacy of the film intact, also using necessary expository dialogue in a witty, playful manner.
“Ant-Man & The Wasp” blew by its predecessor by more than $100 million at the worldwide box office and has proven a viable, smaller version of a Marvel franchise. We spoke to Peyton Reed about being a kind of dual sequel—to “Ant-Man” and the impacting events of “Captain America: Civil War”— following in the footsteps of Marvel’s flagship Titan, sequels and more. “Ant-Man & The Wasp” is now on Blu-Ray/DVD and digital distribution services everywhere.
READ MORE: Kevin Feige Says That ‘Ant-Man & The Wasp’ Sets Up Legacy Characters For Future MCU Films
“Ant-Man & The Wasp” is a perfect kind of antidote to the somberness of “Avengers: Infinity,” were you mindful of that?
Well, we always knew we would follow ‘Infinity War,’ and we know it ended, but from the beginning, we were just trying to expand on the tone and characters that we created in the first movie.
It’s very similar to three years ago when “Ant-Man” had to follow “Avengers: Age of Ultron,” the first Avengers sequel and a huge movie that also got pretty dark. So it’s ‘Ant-Man’s lot in life to follow in the shadow of these more massive Avengers movies, but I think we really like where we sit in that regard.
It’s appropriate for Ant-Man as a tiny hero, he’s literally in the shadow of all these other heroes, and I think that’s part of what makes it fun. These ‘Ant-Man’ movies are big, and they offer, all the spectacle of the Marvel movies, but there’s hopefully a scrappiness to the movies too.
The writing: it’s an unusual position you’re in given the events of ‘Civil War,’ that actively impact your sequel. Was it a kind of blessing and curse to a) not have to write from a blank page or come up with a new launching pad, and b) follow the events handed down to you from ‘Civil War.’
I think that’s an accurate way to put it. We knew we had to take into account the events of ‘Civil War,’ and it was really like, “oh man, we’re almost like making a sequel to two movies and how’s that going to work?” And at a certain point, once we saw the first cut of ‘Civil War,’ I had an obvious reaction to the fact that Scott Lang took the Ant-Man suit [without permission] and fought with the Avengers. I immediately thought about Hope and Hank, how pissed off Hank Pym was going to be about this and how Hope is going to feel betrayed, and so it gave us a great idea, both technically dramatically how to progress these characters and story forward. One that’s really about the potential formation of this [Ant-Man and The Wasp] partnership— we start out those two characters estranged. They’re not in each other’s lives at the beginning of the movie as a direct result of the events of ‘Civil War.’ So, when we hit on that, it became, “ahhh, okay, this is a blessing and not a curse.” This actually gives us something sturdy to hold onto it at the beginning of the movie.
It is a pretty uncommon position to be in—waiting to see what your launching pad might be and where other filmmakers take your character first.
Sure, but the first “Ant-Man” had so much origin and set up, not just explaining, the powers of Ant-Man and shrinking and growing and controlling ants and Hank and Darren Cross, there’s so much stuff to set up in that movie. And here, we can hit the ground running with our characters.
It also presents a fun, creative challenge to have, to sort of inherit some of these story points from other movies and other movies have to inherit them from us as well. There’s a lot of interplay between people like the Russo brothers, myself and James Gunn and everybody else who’s doing movies at Marvel [editor’s note: the interview was conducted before Gunn was fired from Marvel].
But we did have to sort of get the audience up to speed if they had not seen either of those movies, particularly ‘Civil War.’ The reason Scott Lang was on house arrest—he violated the Sokovia Accords with Captain America, which kind of led to us doing this insanely long agent Jimmy Woo monologue that he gives to [Ant-Man’s daughter] Cassie blatantly over-explaining the whole thing which is probably okay in the Ant-Man context. This is the tone of “Ant-Man and The Wasp,” so let’s, let’s give this exposition to Randall Park and let him run with it.
That’s such a fun, creative use of exposition. It’s really clever, amusing and self-aware. It reads immediately like rather than viewing the curse of exposition as a comedic opportunity rather than a necessary evil.
Cool, I’m glad you see that. It’s getting Randall Park, someone I love. Randall’s someone who can go toe to toe with Paul Rudd and his improv skills are just insane, but also helping build this character. I got very fortunate with Randall.