Edgar Wright shares real reason behind ‘heartbreaking’ Ant-Man exit

Edgar Wright has opened up about the “heartbreaking” decision to depart Ant-Man when Marvel bosses wanted to pen a script without him.
The British filmmaker had worked on the superhero movie for some time alongside Attack the Block director Joe Cornish, who’d previously landed a small cameo in Wright’s comedy Hot Fuzz.
However in 2014 Wright officially dropped out of the project after already completing a majority of the film’s casting, including Paul Rudd in the title role, and the director has finally spoken about the real reason behind this exit.
“I think the most diplomatic answer is I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie,” he sighed to Variety. “It was a really heartbreaking decision to have to walk away after having worked on it for so long, because me and Joe Cornish in some form… It’s funny some people say, ‘Oh they’ve been working on it for eight years,’ and that was somewhat true, but in that time I had made three movies so it wasn’t like I was working on it full time. But after The World’s End I did work on it for like a year, I was gonna make the movie.”
Wright continued to recall how Marvel requested he give the task of finishing touches to the studio, something he wasn’t used to doing having had full creative control of his previous ventures. Revealing bosses wanted to do a draft of the screenplay without him, it seems this was the final straw for the star as he felt too out of the loop.
“I was the writer-director on it and then they wanted to do a draft without me, and having written all my other movies, that’s a tough thing to move forward thinking if I do one of these movies I would like to be the writer-director,” he admitted. “Suddenly becoming a director for hire on it, you’re sort of less emotionally invested and you start to wonder why you’re there, really.”
In the end, Wright and Cornish’s names were joined by Rudd and Adam McKay on the screenplay credits.