Edgar Wright Quit 'Ant-Man' Over Marvel's Script Rewrites

When the world learned last week that director Edgar Wright had left Marvel's Ant-Man, a shocked Internet wanted to know why. How could Wright leave this high-profile Marvel project after working on it for almost a decade? At that time, our best guess was that Wright and Marvel just had different creative visions for Ant-Man.

Well, those suspicions have been confirmed by The Hollywood Reporter, which writes on Wednesday that Marvel was "unhappy" with Wright and Joe Cornish's Ant-Man script and put the production on hiatus to do its own rewrites.

Wright, 40, is an irreverent British filmmaker, and sources say Marvel had been unhappy with his take on Ant-Man for weeks. Originally set to begin shooting June 2, the production had been put on hiatus while Feige ordered revisions of the script that was co-written by Wright and Joe Cornish. According to sources, Wright had been willing to make revisions earlier in the process. But the new rewrites took place without Wright's input, and when he received Marvel's new version early during the week of May 19, he walked, prompting a joint statement announcing his exit "due to differences in their visions of the film."

As THR points out, the scope of Ant-Man had changed from when first began working on it in 2006. Back then, Ant-Man was seen as a standalone movie, but with the massive success of the cohesive Marvel Cinematic Universe in the years to come, Marvel and its president, Kevin Feige, obviously wanted Ant-Man to fit into the bigger picture.

THR also reports that Ant-Man's "key crew — its heads of departments — departed when it became clear production would not begin as scheduled July 28." So in addition to replacing Wright as director, Marvel has several key crew positions to fill.

While many on the Internet are trying to paint Wright's departure as a sign that the sky is falling at Marvel Studios, I'm confident the studio will still be able to pull things together and deliver Ant-Man in time to hit its July 17, 2015, release date. This isn't the first time Marvel has had to replace a director. They've recast entire major roles between movies. I don't think they're going to be worried about finding a few new heads of departments.