It has been a bloody couple of weeks following the announcement that Edgar Wright had walked away as director of Marvel Studios’ Ant-Man movie, with rumor after rumor of proposed replacement directors on the project. First it was Adam McKay of Anchorman, who announced he wasn’t gonna take the gig almost as soon as his name was floated to the press. Then there was Ruben Fleischer (who directed Zombieland) and Rawson Marshall Thurber (who directed We’re The Millers), but Thurber noped out of the job a couple days ago, while in the meantime Paul Rudd has presumably been at some undisclosed location, lifting weights and eating skinless chicken and steamed broccoli, and possibly wondering if he can use his new superhero physique to beat his fucking agent into oblivion.
But as of today, Marvel Studios’ (if not our) long national nightmare is over, because they have officially announced that Peyton Reed will be directing the movie. To which we, and I presume much of fandom in general, gave a loud and resounding… “who?”
According to Reed’s IMDB profile, he has most recently been directing TV episodes of The New Girl and a few TV movies, but he has also directed Yes Man with Jim Carrey, and Bring It On – yes, that cheerleader flick with Mary Jane from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies and Faith from Buffy. But back in the early 90s, he directed some episodes of the Back To The Future TV show (yes, I too was surprised there was a Back To The Future TV series), so he has at least some genre experience.
Marvel further announced that Adam McKay, despite having turned down the directing chair, will be doing some script work on the project… work of the type that reported started this whole mess in the first place. McKay’s IMDB profile indicates that he has written a lot projects (most of them involving Ron Burgundy), including a short entitled A Public Statement From Anthony Weiner’s Penis. So clearly he’s the man to write a superhero adventure.
Look, I liked Anchorman, and I have been known to get hammered and enjoy Bring It On in a weirdly prurient way. But more and more this project just has the stink of death about it. I’ve said before that the only person who has ever screamed to get an Ant-Man movie made was Edgar Wright, and now that he’s off the project, well, one minus one means exactly what you think it means.
The way it looks is that this is a project started by someone with passion for it, heavily modified by corporate interests, and now being taken over by people who at best have an interest in trying their hand at a big blockbuster action comedy and at worst have an interest in taking a shot at Joss Whedon’s contractual percentage of the gross. We’ve got a film already in production with a hard deadline now being reworked by committee under no unifying vision beyond maybe Kevin Feige’s.
And all these divergent and new parties need to come together, get working… and have something, anything, to show off in Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con in seven or fewer weeks. This… is gonna be interesting. In that Chinese curse kinda way.
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