Dare we believe it? Has Marvel finally landed its Ant-Man? It would appear so, and Paul Rudd is the actor who will be taking on the insect sized mantle.
It may seem odd to believe in the certainty of the reports considering the liberal use of the word “negotiations” (which equates to money speak, I can imagine Rudd and his team are making Marvel work for it) in every article reporting the casting. Who knows, in a few weeks we may find out we’ve all been had but for now it would appear that Rudd is our guy and will be playing Hank Pym in the upcoming Marvel Studios production helmed by Edgar Wright (The Worlds End, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World).
With the script written by Joe Cornish (Attack the Block), this is a film that has taken years to fully get off the ground and is planned for release after the upcoming Avengers sequel The Avengers: Age of Ultron. This has put many a comic-book purist into bouts of bafflement as in the comic books it is Ant-Man who created Ultron but Marvel has deviated from their origins lore before and it’s never been a detriment so it’s too soon to cast doubt.
Rudd is by no means a typical choice for the superhero role; however he is ideal of an Edgar Wright film, a director whose love of film and ease with dead pan and action oriented material makes him the director for the job. He’s shown what he can do with elaborate action sequences in The Worlds End and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World and has never delivered a film that isn’t highly intelligent, high tier quality and riddled with fantastically layered performances. Maybe you can’t put your faith in Rudd, but put it in Wright.
Also keep in mind that Robert Downey Jr. was never the go-to choice for Iron Man and Jon Favreau had to vouch for him, and now his name is synonymous with Tony Stark. Mark Ruffalo also didn’t seem like a typical choice for the Hulk-more so Bruce Banner- and despite this, he gave us the best version of the Hulk yet, nearly stealing the movie away from all of the other larger than life characters. We had never heard of Tom Hiddleston or Chris Hemsworth before Thor, yet you can’t argue that it looked as if they had walked directly off of their comic book panel. Marvel has made a career, an industry, of making interesting choices for their characters that leave us scratching our heads initially and then later have us wondering why we ever doubted them in the first place.
It’s a fun time to be a Marvel fan as they continue to serialize film in a way that no other series ever has and continues to up the ante in a way that makes other studios hastily trying to replicate. Enjoy the casting and hopefully movie will blow us away.
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