Still promoting The World’s End, director Edgar Wright sat down with the Huffington Post, who asked him indirectly about the connections between Avengers: Age of Ultron and his 2015 film, Ant-Man.
In the comics world, Hank Pym is the inventor of Ultron, yet we will be introduced to the latter before the former arrives on screen. He also speaks about overcomplicating films with adding too many villains at the same time as the hero is being introduced:
It was never in my script. Because even just to sort of set up what Ant-Man does is enough for one movie. It’s why I think “Iron Man” is extremely successful because it keeps it really simple. You have one sort of — the villain comes from the hero’s technology. It’s simple. So I think why that film really works and why, sometimes, superhero films fail — or they have mixed results — because they have to set up a heroand a villain at the same time. And that’s really tough. And sometimes it’s unbalanced.
You know, when I was younger I used to love Tim Burton’s “Batman.” I was like 15 and even then I was aware, “This is really the Joker’s film.” It’s like, the Joker just takes over and Batman, you really don’t learn too much about him. Comics haveyears to explain this stuff and in a movie you have to focus on one thing. So it’s about kind of streamlining, I think. Some of the most successful origin films actually have a narrower focus. You cannot put 50 years of the Marvel universe into a movie. It’s impossible.
Wright makes an excellent point: we have seen far too many superhero films muddled by trying to cram the origin story of a villain into the same running time as the hero. We’ve got a good feeling about this one.
Ant-Man is release on 6 November 2015 from Disney.
