MCU: 10 Fascinating Facts Behind Ant-Man (2015)

2. Why Edgar Wright Left

The full story of Edgar Wright's Ant-Man will probably never be entirely revealed. What we know broadly is that Wright was involved with the MCU from its earliest days but he left, eventually, because his vision for the movie simply didn't match the studio's. Rather than be forced to make a movie he didn't want to, he walked away.

Appearing on Variety’s Playback Podcast, Wright revealed his side of the story:

“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.”

“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 says he ultimately didn't want to surrender the script to someone else as it didn't match the way he made movies:

"But then 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. 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.”

At least we got Baby Driver out of him leaving, though.