It would appear that the tale of the Ant-Man film is already getting off to a rocky start. With the original director bailing out (and being replaced by Peyton Reed soon after), Marvel’s president now attempts to assure everyone that things are still in good hands.
Touting his history working with the director, Kevin Feige took the opportunity during a recent Q&A to address the film’s future. “Peyton is someone that I’ve been a fan of for a long time. People may not remember, though probably your readers remember, that he was attached to Fantastic Four more than 10 years ago. We spent a lot of time together… and I got along with Peyton very, very well and he had awesome ideas and an awesome vision for the movie, and for various reasons he ended up leaving that movie…’Peyton was always on our lists, and so when this happened and Edgar Wright said ‘Not for me’ we met with a handful of people, but Peyton was always one that I thought would be great.” He states.
While many in Hollywood would jump at the chance of directing such a high-profile project as a Marvel film, Feige says he was unsure whether Reed would actually accept. Revealing the director’s initial trepidations (after the very public split between the studio and Wright), he apparently wanted to “…be sure that he was wasn’t just inheriting something or following someone else’s lead. Or wasn’t inheriting something that the evil studio had watered down to be something bad. I kept saying, ‘You can either read what’s online, or come in and talk to us and look at all this stuff.’ He looked at everything, he talked with us, and he said ‘Number one, I agree with the direction you’re going in. And number two, I can add to it.’ And he has – the movie is in as good a shape as it’s ever been right now.”
Ant-Man stars Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas. It is expected to hit theaters next summer.