Can 'Ant-Man' Ever Find A Perfect Director?

No, Marvel has not shown up at Edgar Wright's door in the rain and with flowers begging him to take them back, yet. If they have, the answer appears to be no, because the search for a new Ant-Man director is still going strong. The newest names being thrown into the ring? Nicholas Stoller and Michael Dowse, the former of whom directed Neighbors and the latter of whom directed that 2011 Topher Grace movie Take Me Home Tonight.

It continues to be clear that Marvel's going for a comedy when it comes to Ant-Man, but it probably won't be anywhere near as subversive as anything Edgar Wright's ever done. I have nothing against any of the people whose names have been circling around Ant-Man since Wright's departure; Adam McKay, who was in the running before he dropped out of it, is a damn pro and I'm a big Anchorman fan. I also quite enjoyed Neighbors.

But — and I know this is constitutes continued griping over Wright's departure — Neighbors is no Hot Fuzz. Neighbors is a great, very straightforward comedy; it is packaged to the masses expertly, hitting every beat a big blockbuster comedy is expected to. And it does it pretty well. But Hot Fuzz is visionary. As The Mary Sue's Rebecca Pahle put it, most other films don't fill me with "the magical feeling I had in 2007 when I sat down to watch Hot Fuzz, that feeling of 'Holy crap, I’ve never seen anything quite like this movie before.'" It's the kind of irreverent energy that Wright brings, the kind you can't just try to re-capture with somebody else.

Marvel will forge on with the Ant-Man movie, not because it's in any way the "right thing" to do, but because they've been working on it since 2006 and it'd be a waste of millions of dollars not to. Ant-Man the big Marvel movie will exist, likely as a very straightforward comedy — Paul Rudd and his glorious face are in it, after all. We wish Stoller, or Dowse, or whoever else takes on this challenge, a genuinely good experience and the best of luck. But many fans, myself included, will continue to be bitter that Edgar Wright's creative vision was thrown in the garbage like weeks-old Chinese food.