With the news last week that Disney had acquired Marvel, the internet went into one of those all to frequent fanboy panics, in which nerds ran to their blogs and predicted a world where Marvel would be forced to make Donald Duck the newest member of the Fantastic Four. Of course none of those more insane predictions will ever really happen, in fact most of Marvel’s bigger name superhero characters are already locked up in other deals with non-Disney studios. That leaves only minor characters for Disney to play around with, characters like Ant-Man.
In the new Entertainment Weekly’s coverage of the Marvel-Disney deal they randomly drop this aside: “Pixar is said to already be eyeballing an Ant-Man movie.” They offer no further explanation for this particular minor bombshell, but there was news last week that Disney-Pixar animation head John Lasseter was meeting with Marvel’s team. With better characters like Iron Man already taken, doing Ant-Man might make sense.
If you’ve restarted your Marvel-Disney merger panic, cool it. Pixar’s already been responsible for one of the best superhero films ever made. The Incredibles is far better than anything Marvel Studios has done so far. Pixar can only make Marvel better. In particular, taking on a character like Ant-Man makes sense, since creating a live-action movie in which a character grows and shrinks in a convincing manner would likely prove cost prohibitive. Unless of course, you’re willing to settle for a superhero version of Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. Pixar can do better.
There’s one minor hitch here and that’s the fact that Marvel already had a live-action Ant-Man in development. They already have a script, written by Hot Fuzz’s Edgar Wright, who had also planned to direct. Wright has been busy working on Scott Pilgrim, but when he finishes most had assumed Ant-Man to be next. If EW’s story is correct, then perhaps we’ll soon see Edgar trying his hand at directing animation. Or maybe Wright is out entirely, a consequence of his choosing Scott Pilgrim over getting things done with his Ant-Man script. We’ll let you know, as soon as there’s some sort of official announcement.
