Today has seen a flurry of Marvel news. First we found out that we’ll probably see Guardians of the Galaxy in 2014, then we heard that Marvel and Disney was turning Japanese with the Big Hero 6, and now we get our first concrete bit of news on the Ant-Man front in ages.
As you may know, Edgar (Shaun of the Dead) Wright and co-writer Joe (Attack the Block) Cornish has been working on the script for the formic hero for about 5 years already, with nothing to really show for it except cryptic teases.
But he’s recently done a lot more than just tease, as it’s been revealed that he’s just wrapped filming on some Ant-Man test footage!
According to a report from Heat Vision, Wright recently took a week off from working on The World’s End – the third entry in his, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s informally titled Blood and Ice Cream trilogy – to put together a test reel to show off to the head honchos over at Marvel. The test reel apparently gives an impression of the tone that Wright would be aiming for, and also gives a look as to how he would be depicting Ant-Man’s size changing powers on screen. Now the ball is in Marvel’s court to decide if they like Wright’s vision or whether some concepts would need to be reworked.
Clearly, fans would be clamouring for everything to go smoothly, so that production can get underway as soon as possible, but as Wright recently explained on a Empire Online podcast, sometime we just need to be a little patient:
“I get quite superstitious because I don’t feel like anybody — websites and stuff — quite understands how hard long it takes and because the film websites update hourly, it’s like ‘What’s the fucking hold up? Just make it. Why isn’t it coming out tomorrow?’ But every film that I’ve made has taken like three years. Each one, it’s been three years between movies. I would love for that gap to be shorter, but the truth is there’s — it’s almost like a holding pattern. There are planes in the air and you have to figure out which one is going to land before they all crash.”
If you take the average development times on these things into consideration, Wright would have to get to work as soon as The World’s End wraps if he wants to see an Ant-Man movie ready before Avenger 2 in 2015. I’m guessing that it could nicely occupy that 2014 third-quarter to holiday season blank spot on their newly reshuffled Marvel Movie Second Wave calendar.
For those of you unfamiliar with the character, Ant-Man was the masked identity of Hank Pym, a genius biogeneticist who invented Pym Particles, a substance that allowed it’s user to alter his size and mass at will. Donning a special helmet that allowed him to communicate with insects, Pym would shrink down to become the diminutive hero Ant-Man. In the comics he was one of the founding members of the Avengers, and would later use his size changing abilities to also adopt the gigantic identity of Goliath.
What’s most important to me about his inclusion in the Marvel landscape though, is that as an incredible scientist, Pym would invent a number of very important things for the team. But his most infamous invention would definitely be the so-called perfect robotic being Ultron, who would eventually turn out to be one of, if not the greatest of the Avengers’ adversaries. He would be the perfect villain for an Avengers 3, as not only is he is an almost unstoppable badass in his own right, but he would also tie into the Guardians of the Galaxy.
“How so?”, I hear you ask. Well, if you read my earlier article, you would have seen me mention the Annihilation: Conquest war as the event that brought the modern incarnation of the Guardians together. The instigator of that war? None other than Ultron himself.
Last Updated: June 29, 2012
