Marvel’s main push this year is Avengers: Age of Ultron, but there’s a little, big-budget movie coming just a few months after. That would be Ant-Man! Peyton Reed took over for Edgar Wright in helming the story of Scott Lang’s adventures as the size-shrinking defender, and now Marvel has unleashed the first clip from the superhero heist movie.
The clip originally debuted on The Late Show with David Letterman, though Comic Book Resources snagged a copy for the Internet. Here, we meet Paul Rudd as Lang, a master thief looking to score something big. With the help of his accomplices, he breaks into a vault using ingenious scientific reasoning — "ice expands but metal doesn’t" — but there are no jewels or cash to plunder. Instead, he finds the Ant-Man suit, or as he calls it, "an old motorcycle suit." Silly rabbit!
It’s unclear at which point in the film this scene takes place, but we gather that this might be part of the beginning. When Marvel first introduces us to Lang, he’s a thief by trade, far from the ideal superhero he’ll eventually become. After he gets caught and released from prison, though, the original Ant-Man, Hank Pym (Michael Douglas), requires his specific skill set. His former business partner, Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), has taken Pym’s size-shrinking super-suit technology and is planning on profiting from it. To get it away from him, Pym tasks Lang with breaking into Cross Industries and stealing it back.
The first couple trailers for Ant-Man flaunt the innate humor that comes from something like a superhero that can communicate with ants and maintain super-strength when the size of an insect. It also revealed a few hilarious scenes, in which Lang battles the villainous Yellowjacket on top of a Thomas the Tank Engine toy set, and jokes about naming his superhero alter-ego after an ant. Still, it looks like a helluva good time.
The only concern around the film was in regards to the script. Wright wrote the original treatment for Ant-Man, but he abandoned the project over creative differences with Marvel. Since then, Anchorman’s Adam McKay came aboard to help rewrite the script. There had been some debate as to who would be credited for the work, though The Wrap now reports that Edgar Wright & Joe Cornish and Adam McKay & Paul Rudd will be credited on the screenplay, while Wright & Cornish also acquired the story credit.
Avengers director Joss Whedon recently said that Wright’s Ant-Man script was the best of any Marvel movie, so hopefully Reed and his team will be able to make something equally impressive. If Marvel can make the world fall in love with a talking tree, then Ant-Man could still be a win.
