Edgar Wright Explains An Ultron-Less ANT-MAN

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Let’s be honest. Most of the movie-going public didn’t even know what an Ultron was until The Avengers: Age of Ultron title was announced at Comic Con. But fanboys quickly realized there was something wrong with Ultron appearing in a movie before Edgar Wright’s Ant-Man, which kicks off Marvel Phase Three in the fall of 2015.

Instead of having Hank Pym (Ant-Man) build the living automaton, most people now assume that Tony Stark or Jarvis will be the supervillain’s creator in Avengers 2. But according to an interview Edgar Wright gave to HuffPost, the director never intended to take on such a major villain in his first outing with Ant-Man:

It was never in my script. Because even just to sort of set up what Ant-Man does is enough for one movie. It’s why I think Iron Man is extremely successful because it keeps it really simple. You have one sort of — the villain comes from the hero’s technology. It’s simple. So I think why that film really works and why, sometimes, superhero films fail — or they have mixed results — because they have to set up a hero and a villain at the same time. And that’s really tough. And sometimes it’s unbalanced.

Edgar Wright goes further, using another comic book movie that infamously strayed from the canon, to explain his reasoning:

You know, when I was younger I used to love Tim Burton’s Batman. I was like 15 and even then I was aware, “This is really the Joker’s film.” It’s like, the Joker just takes over and Batman, you really don’t learn too much about him. Comics have years to explain this stuff and in a movie you have to focus on one thing. So it’s about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus. You cannot put 50 years of the Marvel universe into a movie. It’s impossible.

Wright also explains (warns?) that like Joss Whedon’s Ultron or Shane Black’s the Mandarin, he’s willing to take liberties with the character in order to introduce him to the film world:

I think there’s something in that it’s a lesser known character, there’s hopefully more license. For the one percent of people who are like, “Wait, Hank Pym would never do that!” there’s 99 percent going, “Who’s Hank Pym?” So, to me, the source material is great but it also frees you up to be like: I’m going to make a movie. The movie is not going to represent 50 years of Marvel comics because that’s impossible. But I’m going to make a 100 minute movie — or 110 minutes [laughs].

Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.

Source: HuffPost