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Does the fact that Joss Whedon is going to introduce robotic villain Ultron in the next Avengers movie ahead of his comic book creator, Hank Pym — A.K.A. Ant-Man, amongst many other nom de plumes — cause trouble for Edgar Wright, who has been developing an Ant-Man movie for some time? Not at all, according to Wright, who says that he was never planning to include Pym’s most famous invention in the Ant-Man movie.
“It was never in my script,” Wright told the Huffington Post during a promotional interview for this weekend’s The World’s End. “Even just to sort of set up what Ant-Man does is enough for one movie,” he continued, citing Iron Man as an example of a movie that manages to succeed at introducing the hero and villain simultaneously without overloading the audience with information.
“The villain [in Iron Man] comes from the hero’s technology. It’s simple,” he explained. “I think why that film really works and why, sometimes, superhero films fail — or they have mixed results — [is] 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.”
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“Comics have years to explain this stuff and in a movie you have to focus on one thing,” Wright argued. “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.”
It’s tempting to look into these comments for some hint at just what Wright is planning for the Ant-Man movie, but given Hank Pym’s difficult past as a comic character — Outside of creating the robotic villain Ultron, the character is known more for slapping his wife in a 1980s comic book than for any actual superheroics — it’s hard to imagine what villain could parallel his origin. Unless, in the movie universe, his wife is the villain of the piece…?
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