Published June 03, 2014 by Devin Faraci
Report: Rawson Thurber Squashes ANT-MAN Involvement
Another one bites the dust?
A report at This Is Infamous claims that Rawson Thurber has officially passed on directing Ant-Man. With Adam McKay having apparently also passed this leaves one guy on the shortlist: Ruben Fleischer, who has been mentioned as a choice for Ghostbusters 3, a job he's far more likely to take.
There's a boilerplate thing we all say in these cases, which is 'the story behind the movie is more dramatic than the movie itself!' but in this case not only is it true, I'm dying for the full story to be told because I've heard so many conflicting things in the last week. The stuff I've heard - from very, very good sources - runs the gamut from 'Marvel got Machiavellian with how they approached this' to 'Marvel got caught totally flatfooted by this whole thing,' which are pretty much the exact opposite ends of the spectrum.
I've said this since the day that Edgar Wright left the project - let it go. This is one hundred percent an execution-dependent project, and at this point everybody's having their time wasted as Marvel stumbles forward towards a start date on a movie that no longer has any valid artistic reason to exist. I don't even think an Ant-Man movie, devoid of a singular vision, has a commercial reason to exist. If Marvel is going through the five stages of grief (and stage one, denial, was when they thought they could hand Edgar Wright a script some dude rewrote) they're in the middle of bargaining, and I think they need to just blaze through depression and get right to acceptance.
Hey, maybe Ant-Man will still get made and will be great. There are amazing movies with terrible production histories - The Wizard of Oz and Gone With The Wind have like six directors between them (although Victor Fleming gets final credit on both) - but that's rare. If the movie gets made I'm rooting for it to be good, because I'm going to end up owning the goddamn thing in the Phase Three Blu-ray set no