Edgar Wright Can't Bring Himself To Watch Marvel's 'Ant-Man'

Even though Ant-Man turned out to be pretty good when it arrived in theaters back in 2015, there was a time when the project was a point of concern at Marvel Studios. After developing and writing the project for eight years, writer/director Edgar Wright departed the film over creative differences. Recently, the filmmaker said diplomatically to Variety, "I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don't think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie."

In a new interview, Edgar Wright was asked if he took the time to see how Ant-Man turned out after he left and it was handed it off to director Peyton Reed. The answer is no, and Wright can't even bring himself to watch the trailer.

Uproxx reporter Mike Ryan talked to Edgar Wright about Ant-Man and here's what he had to say:

"I haven't seen it and I haven't even seen the trailer. It would kind of like be asking me, 'Do you want to watch your ex-girlfriend have sex?' Like, 'No, I'm good.' The closest I came to it was that somebody sitting near me on a flight was watching it. And when I saw that the person sitting next to me was going to watch the movie, I thought, hmm, maybe I'm going to do some work on my laptop. I don't think they knew who I was. They were just watching it. That was the closest I came to seeing it."

The fact that Edgar Wright won't watch Ant-Man isn't really surprising. After spending so many years developing it, why would you want to see what someone else did with a bunch of the work you put into the project? Wright revealed that he had a tough time after walking away from Ant-Man, mostly because it took a little longer than he hoped to get Baby Driver off the ground. He explains:

"I'd say, and I've never told this in an interview before, the toughest part of that whole thing for me was that when I walked away from that movie, I said to my agent, 'As long as I'm making another movie by the time that one comes out, I'll be fine.' And then the truth of the matter was I wasn't shooting Baby Driver by the time it came out. And that was the toughest part. Around the time that that movie came out, Baby Driver was still maybe happening, maybe not happening. It didn't really get the official green light for another four months afterwards. So that, to me, was the toughest moment of the whole thing."

Even though Edgar Wright was disappointed to walk away from the movie, there was at least one good thing that came from his time on the movie. Wright was happy that he was able to get his good friend Paul Rudd the lead role:

"I'll never be pressed into kind of bad-mouthing it, because the truth of the matter is my friends are in it. Paul Rudd is a friend of mine and we're still very good friends. And in fact, I saw him in New York the other week and we had dinner and it was the first time we'd had a chance to properly sit down since that whole thing. And the one thing I'll say about that movie is I'm pleased that I got a writing credit on it, because it sort of makes up for having worked on the script for like eight years. Two is that I got my friend, Paul, a part in a major film. And I did say to Paul, he knows I haven't seen it, I said, 'You know, I haven't seen the movie, and I will never watch it. I did see you in Civil War, and you were the funniest bit.'"

It's good to hear that the presence of Ant-Man hasn't sullied the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for Edgar Wright. As for the rest of us, even though we ended up liking Ant-Man for the most part, we'll always wonder what it would have been like to have a filmmaker like Wright behind the camera for a Marvel movie. At the same time, I'm glad that we're still getting original movies out of him like Baby Driver.