The Ant-Man movies are comfortably part of the cinema landscape today. However, when the movies were first being developed, fans and the creatives weren’t sure how the oddball character would translate to film. After some behind-the-scenes misfires, Paul Rudd and the Marvel team landed on an interpretation that audiences loved.
How did a superhero with a funny name, a sketchy past, and a strange power set, wind up as a key figure in modern blockbuster cinema? In part, it’s thanks to input from creator Stan Lee himself.
Paul Rudd has played Ant-Man for nearly a decade
Rudd officially joined the Marvel Cinematic Universe with 2015’s Ant-Man. After establishing his take on Scott Lang — the second Ant-Man after Hank Pym, played by Michael Douglas — he made a guest appearance in Captain America: Civil War in 2016.
He headlined his own film again with Ant-Man and The Wasp in 2018. Then, Rudd had a surprisingly moving appearance as a beaten-down Lang in the 2019 crossover film Avengers: Endgame.
The time skip scenario from Endgame set the stage for the slightly more serious action/adventure tone of 2023’s Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania.
Stan Lee had some interesting things to say about ‘Ant-Man’ to Rudd
Ant-Man seemed like an odd fit for film when it was first proposed. Sure, hugely popular Marvel characters like Spider-Man had already survived the translation to the silver screen with great success. But Ant-Man risked being a step too far — after all, one of his key abilities is literally communicating with ants.
The studio had trouble finding the right tone. They even moved on from an interpretation that had completed test footage by Scott Pilgrim director Edgar Wright. But according to Rudd, in a video on the GQ YouTube channel, Lee helped give him confidence with a very different perspective on the character. Apparently, the size-changing craziness that defines the character was something the Marvel Comics mastermind envisioned for the character from the start.
“He felt in the comics, it was very tough to really gauge the scale,” the actor said. “If you’re drawing Ant-Man, you can’t really draw other things at the proper scale. So audiences were going to finally see Ant-Man in the way that he always envisioned Ant-Man.”
Audiences and critics are divided on the new ‘Ant-Man’ film
The Ant-Man films moved on from Wright and eventually all three were helmed by noted comedy director Peyton Reed. Reed created a franchise filled with warm comedy, leveraging the comic instincts of actors like Rudd and Michael Pena. And yes, all three movies lean into the spectacle of all that size-changing action, just as Lee said they should.
Reed lobbied to try for a different tone more in line with the Avengers films for Quantumania. They landed on a movie that is still layered with jokes like the other two Ant-Man movies, but with more sci-fi and adventure elements. According to Rotten Tomatoes, the critical reaction to this change is very much mixed.
Our own Jeff Nelson didn’t enjoy an Ant-Man film carrying the weight of setting up the latest phase of the ongoing Marvel story. There’s something inherently frustrating about the finale of a trilogy serving primarily as setup for future media. But Rudd is still wonderful as Lang, so this still might be worth a look while it’s still in theaters.
