Edgar Wright Talks About 'Ant-Man' and Why We Won't See Ultron in This Movie

While Warner Bros. struggles to figure out how to make its next superhero movie, Marvel is hard at work fleshing out its plans for 2015 and beyond. After The Avengers: Age of Ultron brings Phase Two of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to a close in May 2015, Ant-Man will kick off Phase Three that fall. With the studio focusing on Phase Two at Comic-Con, fans didn't get the Ant-Man scoop they were hoping for, but director Edgar Wright revealed some of his thinking in an interview with The Huffington Post on Tuesday.

When Marvel announced that the sequel to The Avengers would have the subtitle Age of Ultron, fans started speculating that the movie would introduce Hank Pym, the creator of Ultron, before the character was fleshed out in Ant-Man. Joss Whedon quickly debunked that rumor, leaving us with two outcomes. One, Tony Stark will likely be the one who creates Ultron, the android who gains intelligence and turns against humanity, in The Avengers: Age of Ultron. An Iron Man suit gone rogue would be a good guess here. Two, Ant-Man will be our introduction to Pym. As Pym has always been the man who created Ultron, could fans expect to see the villain in Ant-Man? From Wright:

"[Ultron] 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."

So while Warner Bros. is going to cram Superman, Batman, Lex Luthor and possibly the Joker into its next movie, Wright and Marvel are perfectly cool establishing a character that most audiences aren't familiar with without cluttering up his story. We shouldn't be surprised that Marvel Studios' movies are massive hits anymore. They've figured out how to do this right.

Wright also discussed the benefits of working with a character that audiences didn't know as well as Iron Man and the other big names in the Marvel 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]."