MCU by Joanna Robinson

Author:Joanna Robinson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2023-08-29T00:00:00+00:00

Baskin-Robbins always finds out.

Ant-Man

EDGAR WRIGHT STARTED WORKING ON MARVEL MOVIES around the same time as Kevin Feige, but to less effect. In the year 2000, Avi Arad convinced Artisan Entertainment, the mini-major studio that had a colossal hit in 1999 with The Blair Witch Project, to partner with Marvel. The two companies created a joint subsidiary and endowed it with the screen rights for a host of Marvel’s characters, many of them lesser-known: Captain America, Thor (earmarked as a TV show), the Punisher, Black Panther (Wesley Snipes was already attached to produce and star), Deadpool (the irreverent mercenary), Man-Thing (a shambling swamp monster), Luke Cage, Iron Fist, Morbius (the vampiric Spider-Man villain), Power Pack, Longshot (a genetically engineered marksman from another dimension), Mort the Dead Teenager (a comedic character who had appeared in just four issues of Marvel comics), and Ant-Man (a superhero who can shrink to the size of an insect). On a visit to Los Angeles, Wright—then a young British TV director hoping to break into the big time—took a meeting with Artisan. When the studio asked if he was a fan of Marvel Comics, he admitted that he was.

“I said that I always was a Marvel Comics kid,” he remembered. “And they said, ‘Are you interested in any of these titles?’ The one that jumped out was Ant-Man, because I had the John Byrne Marvel Premiere #47 from 1979 that David Michelinie had done with Scott Lang that was kind of an origin story. I always loved the artwork, so when I saw that, it just immediately set bells going off.” Wright and his friend Joe Cornish wrote a treatment for a heist movie starring Ant-Man, which Artisan promptly rejected. It had been hoping for family-friendly entertainment more along the lines of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

In 2003, Lionsgate Entertainment bought Artisan for $160 million, which scuttled the Marvel/Artisan partnership. Artisan had hired writers for some of the Marvel properties but had gotten only one film (The Punisher) into production. In the interim, Fox’s X-Men movies had demonstrated that there was a healthy appetite for Marvel superheroes, but Lionsgate wasn’t interested in what it regarded as Marvel’s dregs. Lionsgate let all the Marvel characters (including Ant-Man) revert to the publisher, except for the Punisher; the studio released the Artisan-produced The Punisher in 2004 and then rebooted the franchise a few years later in 2008’s Punisher: War Zone.

Wright was too busy to lament the Ant-Man movie that didn’t happen. The British sitcom he was directing, Spaced, was a hit, and he was writing a screenplay with its male lead, Simon Pegg. That script became the movie Shaun of the Dead, an instant-classic zombie comedy, directed by Wright and starring Pegg and another Spaced alum, Nick Frost.

Wright brought Shaun of the Dead to the 2004 San Diego Comic-Con for an advance screening. During the convention, he also took a meeting with the two men who were running Marvel Studios at the time, Avi Arad and Kevin Feige. “Weirdly enough, I did something for you,” Wright told them.

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