When every movie you release is expected to earn half a billion dollars, you start to lean into that. It’s just good business, right? If the fans are driving your box-office to the stratosphere, you serve the fans.
We’re into the eighth year of the Marvel Cinematic Universe project, that interwoven tapestry of superhero movies that began with Iron Man, built steadily to the billion-dollar baby of Joss Whedon’s The Avengers in 2012 and has been expanding geometrically ever since. As in the comic books from which they’re (freely) adapted, plots and characters crisscross, each film teases the next one, and it’s assumed that the audience knows who fits where and why.
But in the case of Ant-Man, all the Marvel stuff – like, literally all of it – distracts from the smaller, stranger, more personal movie at its core.
Can you just wander into Ant-Man without knowing anything about the Avengers? Of course.
But will it make sense if you don’t know the history of S.H.I.E.L.D. or what happened in Avengers: Age Of Ultron earlier this year or who the Winter Soldier is?
Not really.
It wasn’t always this way. Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish wrote the Ant-Man screenplay as a stand-alone adventure, delivering their first draft well before the Marvel Cinematic Universe blew up. (Wright first told me about it in 2007 when we met on the Hot Fuzz press tour.)
Now, though, Ant-Man is part of the MCU, with various incidental characters deployed here and there to reference other movie and TV projects, and the obligatory post-credit scenes (two of them! don’t leave early!) that fans have come to expect.
A project like that can’t be an Edgar Wright picture. It has to be a Marvel movie. And I’m not sure Marvel movies have any room for artistry.
Each feature has a specific part to play in the larger Marvel project – the one that has movies lined up for the rest of this decade, each with its own precise requirements for the master narrative. Now, just two months after Avengers: Age Of Ultron, I find myself once again wondering if that approach is working for or against the movies.
Age Of Ultron was forced to jump through hoops to introduce new characters amidst the chaos of all the world-saving. The stakes of Ant-Man are much lower, primarily involving the hero’s desire to bond with his little girl, but the script forgets that for long stretches, focusing on yet another origin story.
James Gunn could make Guardians Of The Galaxy as weird as he wanted because it only glancingly connects with the Marvel master narrative. Ant-Man, on the other hand, has to pick up from Age Of Ultron and connect to next spring’s Captain America threequel – which it absolutely does even though neither of those movies is about Ant-Man. It’s what the fans want, right?
The thing is, fans will embrace anything as long as it’s done with integrity and intelligence. Look at what Bryan Fuller is doing with the Hannibal TV series, which is as deliriously baroque as anything Peter Greenaway ever attempted and has won over viewers, myself included, who’d thought a prequel to Red Dragon and The Silence Of The Lambs was pointless.
Hannibal has just been dropped by NBC after three low-rated seasons. But it’s a triumph on every level, and the people who made it will go on to other wonderful things. I would love to see a Marvel movie as daring as any one episode of that show – and the material can accommodate it! Imagine a Dr. Strange film as bizarre as its four-colour version!
That’s the problem. The comics weren’t made for everybody. The movies have to be.
normw@nowtoronto.com | @normwilner
