While Marvel continues to feed occasional news as hors d’oeuvres before their grand feast, they did take a bit of a hit today. Patrick Wilson (The Conjuring, Little Children, that episode of “Girls” that dominated the internet for a day) had to drop out of Ant-Man due to scheduling problems.
Michael Douglas confirmed two weeks ago that the cast of Ant-Man would be in attendance this weekend for the Marvel panel. So it looks like they’ll have to do it without Wilson. Now it wasn’t confirmed what role Wilson would be playing, so this isn’t going to send irreversible shockwaves through Hall H. But to some, Marvel’s handling of Ant-Man is already irreversible. With Edgar Wright spending eight years working on the film, even showing some concepts at a previous Comic-Con, only to part over creative differences and then have his script (co-written with Joe Cornish) tossed in favor of an Adam McKay (Anchorman) re-write. Well, you know the story. New director Peyton Reed has his work cut out for him tomorrow to win some people back. And, while the internet and cineasts at large, are hugely pro-Wright it is a business, it is a Marvel Universe and, as CraveOnline‘s William Bibbiani pointed out, it is complex.
We’ll report on Reed’s version tomorrow, but there is good news for Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, The World’s End) fans. This week Wright added not one, but two projects to his plate.
The first is an old project and goes back to Working Title, who’ve released all of his film’s save Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. So he’s in safe, familiar hands where his vision won’t be filtered through a massive agenda that already has a blueprint for the next 14 years. That film is one that will sound familiar to fans because it was brought up as possibility prior to The World’s End. The World’s End took precedent because it concluded a trilogy for he, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost. So now, Wright has gone back to Baby Driver for his next feature.
Details on Baby Driver are slim. Except that Wright has been working on and off on it since 2008 and it’s said to be a “collision of crime, action music and sound.”
Today, however, puts something brand new on Wright’s plate and, as it’d be an adaptation, it comes with a pre-formed synopsis. Sony — proving that Wright isn’t afraid to go back to a studio — has tapped Wright to direct Grasshopper Jungle which is described in a press release as Stand by Me meets Attack the Block. A screenwriter has been hired and his resume (Scott Rosenberg) can be described as Con Air meets High Fidelity.
Paragraph break: Grasshopper Jungle is categorized as Young Adult. But if that makes you cringe, relax, it seems to contain giant praying mantises and was described by the New York Times Book Review as reminding them of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five. Awesome.
So, on to that synopsis (via Booklist):
“Simmering within Ealing, Iowa, is a deadly genetically engineered plague capable of unleashing unstoppable soldiers—six-foot-tall praying mantises with insatiable appetites for food and sex. No one knows it, of course, until Austin and his best friend Robby accidentally release it on the world. An ever-growing plague of giant, flesh-hungry insects is bad enough, but Austin is also up to his eyeballs in sexual confusion—is he in love with Robby or his girlfriend, Shann? Both of them make him horny, but most things do. In an admittedly futile attempt to capture the truth of his history, painfully honest Austin narrates the events of the apocalypse intermingled with a detailed account of the “connections that spiderweb through time and place,” leading from his great-great-great-grandfather Andrzej in Poland to Shann’s lucky discovery of an apocalypse-proof bunker in her new backyard. (Author) Andrew Smith is up to his old tricks, delivering a gruesome sci-fi treat, a likable punk of a narrator, and a sucker punch ending that satisfyingly resolves everything and nothing in the same breath.”
Now that sounds like something we’d be very interested in seeing. And we know that Wright has some exoskeletal ideas already. Proceed with your Ant-Man presentation Marvel.
Brian Formo is a featured contributor on the CraveOnline Film Channel. You can follow him on Twitter at @BrianEmilFormo.
