Wednesday
23Jul2008
'Ant-Man' Taking a Holiday?
Wednesday, July 23, 2008 at 12:55AM 
There's an update on
Edgar Wright's upcoming superhero movie,
Ant-Man, and it involves waiting a little
longer.
The Hollywood Reporter's
Risky Business Blog says that Wright told a
crowd at the Montreal Just for Laughs comedy festival that rather than compete
with
Marvel's big summer releases in 2010 -
Iron Man 2 and
Thor - that Ant-Man may be Marvel's
first winter release. Even though Marvel is a swing for the fences kind of
company that covets summer releases, Ant-Man is, as Risky Business points
out, less of a known quantity. It probably stands to reason that they'd want to
release the first one with the training wheels on. A good comparison might be
Hellboy, which did well in Spring, gained a loyal following over a couple of
years on video, and wound up opening as a number one movie earlier this month.
Wright says that he's working on his second draft of the
Ant-Man script but that Universal wants his
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World pronto, meaning
production is a long way off for Ant-Man, another reason the middle of
2010 might not be realistic.
Speaking of not being realistic, we
briefly discussed last week how the technology
has not quite caught up to the imagination of superhero authors and artists. We
were talking about a rumored Plastic Man movie at that time, but I think
both Ant-Man and the aforementioned Thor could face some major CGI
hurdles. Ant-Man, for example, is exactly what you think he is, if you're
unfamiliar with the story. And Thor could work, so long as they don't try
to recreate Asgard. Hard to see that coming to life on screen since it's
basically a city in the middle of space with a rainbow bridge leading to it. I'm
also not in love with any of the rumored names for the lead role, but that's
another story altogether.
Marvel faced this CGI dilemma last year with Galactus in
Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer. In the comic, he's an enormous
guy in magenta armor. In the movie, he's a shapeless galactic dust devil. And
even that didn't look very good. I mean, they still can't get the Hulk exactly
right.
So I would imagine that even after Wright is happy with
the script, there's a challenge of how to make a guy the size of an insect look
real enough on screen. No matter how good the story might be in the comic, and
no matter what Wright can do with the script, to me, this is still the major
question mark. And more time can only help solve that question.
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