Edgar Wright and Marvel collaborated on the pre-production of Ant-Man for about eight years, but as the film neared the start of production everything crumbled and now Marvel Studios head honcho Kevin Feige has discussed the fallout with The Guardian.
He begins by saying, “We sat round a table and we realized it was not working. A part of me wishes we could have figured that out in the eight years we were working on it. But better for us and for Edgar that we figure it out then, and not move it through production.”
So what wasn’t working? “The Marvel movies are very collaborative,” Feige said, “and I think they are more collaborative than what he had been used to. And I totally respect that.”
Now where The Guardian‘s Ben Child slips up is in not asking what exactly it means to be “collaborative” because Feige goes on to add “the notion that Marvel was scared, the vision was too good, too far out for Marvel is not true… I don’t want to talk too much about that because I think our movies speak to that. Go look at Iron Man 3; go look at The Winter Soldier; go see Guardians of the Galaxy later this month. It would have to be really out there to be too out there for us.”
This is where I feel Feige is skirting the truth. When he tells me to look at Iron Man 3, Captain America: The Winter Soldier or any of the other Marvel movies I see a bunch of very similar movies. While they’re stories may differ in the slightest amount or characters in each may contribute subtle changes to what’s taking place (such as a talking raccoon and/or tree in Guardians), they still feel like movies cut from the same cloth.
Had Wright stuck around to direct Ant-Man I feel you would have got a film that felt nothing like those movies. So when it comes to saying it was a disagreement over Wright’s vision of the film, that’s what’s being talked about, not story elements, which I believe Feige seems to be alluding to.
So what does it mean when Feige says Wright wasn’t used to the amount of “collaboration” that goes on at Marvel? It could be an allusion to the amount of control the studio seems to have over its films, something Thor: The Dark World director Alan Taylor has complained about in the past. Of course, Wright has yet to comment on the situation though Feige does end the conversation saying, “[T]he perception that the big evil studio was too scared at the outside-the-box creative vision is just not the case.”
Maybe not, maybe it was merely a case of Wright not wanting the studio to wedge in a bunch of nonsense for the sake of sequels while looking over his shoulder for the duration of the film’s shoot. I will say, it’s their right to do so, they’re putting up the millions of dollars, but I don’t think Feige’s comments change anything other than to say I’m not expecting anything tonally different when it comes to new Ant-Man director, Peyton Reed‘s vision of the film from anything I’ve seen in the Marvel universe before. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it… right?
