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It’s just a puzzle to me with all the properties that Marvel owns, that they would close this one. Inhumans, Moon Knight, Powerman, and/or Iron Fist, Hawwkeye, the list goes on and on, but any of these would have been better choices.

When people see a tree in their backyard they think it’s neat. When they see a raccoon, they crow with delight. When they see and ant…they’re ambivalent.

I think this one will pick up more fans in the weeks following release. No, it’s not anything any of the standard fans have expected but there a lot more general movie fans who seem to really have enjoyed it. I’m betting that word of mouth will help boost tickets over the next two weeks.

Edgar Wright’s previous comic book movie, SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, was a box-office flop (despite its good reviews and acclaim by fans and film buffs). His name obviously doesn’t sell tickets, at least not to a mainstream audience in the U.S. So I doubt an ANT-MAN directed by Wright would have done any better.

I can’t comment on ANT-MAN’s quality because I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m looking forward to it. At least it looks fun (and funny), and I’m all for fun superhero movies — as opposed to the dark and humorless DC movie style.

From what I’ve gathered, ANT-MAN has more in common with classic caper films (like RIFFIFI) and ’50s sci-fi (like THE INCREDIBLE SHRINKING MAN) than to modern superhero movies. As John S. said above, it may be more to the liking of general movie fans than to standard comic-book fans.

You know, we say Ant-Man should have legs, and perhaps it will…but I think the Adam Sandler-Kevin James starring Pixels may actually prove a roadblock for that happening. I know, it’s a horrible thing to think about, but I’m just throwing it out there.

Just saw the movie and loved it. Would I have preferred a Hank Pym and Janet Van Dyne movie that was more in line with the classic comics but as far as the MCU goes it’s a nice fit. I think $58 million for a movie about Ant-Man is pretty good.

PIXELS looks like a bomb, with poor marketing. ANT-MAN was a fun caper film, with a charming star that works well for kids too. Hard to expect too much from a character that hasn’t sold well ever. I like that Marvel keeps mixing genres with these films–love to see a Hammer like version of Tomb of Dracula down the line!

It opened at #1, maintaining Marvel’s streak. It’s making money.

The bottom four MCU movies with the lowest openings are all solo Part Ones.

I would not be surprised if, in Phase Four, Marvel releases only Team movies, and uses them as backdoor pilots to introduce new characters (as seen with Falcon, Black Widow, Hawkeye).

This makes for better chemistry (as seen in Guardians of the Galaxy).
It also avoids the Internet minefield of producing a movie starring a strong female protagonist… you can place them in an ensemble, and give them a few moments on screen.

Single characters? Netflix. “TV”. More time (13 hours for Daredevil), less risk, better return on investment. (The Netflix deal? $200 Million budget for 60 episodes. $6 Million for two hours? (It’s about the same cost as Mad Men or Walking Dead.) Compared to… $130 Million for Ant-Man?!? (Yes, Ant-Man has lots of CGI, but it’s not much different than the Marvel Knights, it’s very grounded in gritty urban San Francisco.)

Like the Netflix deal working up to “The Defenders”, any other solo series can do the same (See: They Fight Crime! trope), or cameo the character in one of the Marvel movies.

If a story demands great special effects (Ant-Man, Dr. Strange) or action (Black Panther?), then push it through IMAX and Real 3D.

Also, Marvel can use the movies to springboard television series.
The credit cookie in Dr. Strange can tease Man-Thing and the Nexus of Realities. (Half of the episodes involve strange things in the Florida Everglades, half deal with alternate realities.)

Shawn Kane said: “I think $58 million for a movie about Ant-Man is pretty good.”

Right. I don’t think anyone expected ANT-MAN to do AVENGERS or X-MEN business. Some observers didn’t expect it to open at No. 1.

A lot of people were amazed by GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY’s success, but GUARDIANS tapped into the public’s desire for Star Wars-like space opera; it filled a need as we wait for the actual Star Wars movie in December. ANT-MAN is more of a left-field hit.

Interesting article: “How ANT-MAN highlights the sad state of Marvel’s female characters”:

http://screencrush.com/wasp-marvel-female-characters/

$58 million for an Ant-Man movie is just fine. $58 million for a Marvel superhero movie in a post-Avengers climate is a bit less so. That’s really what it boils down to, and it highlights that the Marvel brand won’t sell HUGE on its own. We didn’t know that up until now. We’ll see what effect that has on Doctor Strange (starring Benedict Cumberbatch, and should be an interesting test case for his popularity), Black Panther, and Captain Marvel. Does the expected threshold for a Marvel solo debut lower? Probably.

With you, as sadly that teaser kind of reminded me of Green Lantern. I have no doubt that the full theatrical trailer will look better and less rushed, but this thing being littered with some rough digital shots doesn’t bode well (in the whole Edgar Wright fiasco, they lost Bill Pope as their DP and transitioned over from film to digital, and it really shows).

Like many others, I don’t know the background of this movie, but I also thought the teaser was pretty bad. I’ve read that it’s a heist movie, but the teaser didn’t have that feel at all. Seemed kind of run-of-the-mill. My 12-year-old son, who loves all of these movies, didn’t seem too impressed either…and by contrast, he could not stop playing “Hooked on a Feeling” on Spotify after watching the GotG teaser.

I expected it to be funnier – how can you have a serious movie about a guy called Ant-Man? (I mean, I guess it worked with Batman, but that feels different. Maybe because he doesn’t shrink.)

Like Green Lantern, casting a guy well known for his comic chops in a movie like this and then not giving him anything funny seems like a bad choice… but maybe the movie is hiding funny stuff that they left out of the trailer……?

How many ‘Ant-Man’ movies will they make before getting round to the wife-beating?

Count me among those holding out hope we’ll see a better trailer in a few months, perhaps featuring the “size-fu” that made Wright’s original teaser so awesome. On balance, though, I’d agree that the kickoff trailer didn’t live up the usual Marvel hype.

Going deeper, I’m very curious about the budgeting, marketing, and positioning of Ant-Man as a franchise.

Marvel typically spends between $140 million and $170 million to produce a franchise opener to leave room for upside in the event of a hit. That strategy worked incredibly well with Iron Man, and more recently, GotG. Ant-Man may not have that luxury. Rudd and Adam McKay are credited as screenwriters but there have been at least two more we know of — Wright and writing partner Joe Cornish — and likely at least a dozen others involved in various rewrites over the years. Add in rush fees for production and the natural inflation that comes with being Hollywood’s “it” studio — every agent is going to ask for more, because Disney is flat-out loaded right now — and it’s reasonable to expect that Marvel is spending $180 million or more to make this film, which would put box office break-even at north of $500 million worldwide.

And where does this film fit? Originally, Ant-Man was to kick off Phase 3. Now, he wraps Phase 2 with Civil War as the new marker for the third installment of MCU films. I wonder if all the hullaballoo has left this film as the cinematic equivalent of a one-shot that exists only on the perimeter of continuity.

Tim, I think Ant-Man always had only a small chance.

A small chance.

Small.

Get it?

Nice. Cue mic drop, take bow.

Marvel films aren’t homogenous. Thor 2 looks nothing like Iron Man. Avengers doesn’t look like either Captain America film. There’s humour in all of them by they all have their own style. Each director has brought their own flavour to things. Wright being off the film is a huge drag, he did one of the best comic book adaptations ever with Scott Pilgrim.

I’m thinking that back in 2006, people thought Ant Man was a silly concept that would benefit from a quirky directorial perspective, but by 2014, Disney folks realized that Henry Pym is kind of a strategic character in the Avengers universe. Once we started hearing Ultron being thrown around as the villain of the next movie, it was hard to imagine they’d introduce Ultron’s creator in a film that promised to be subversive of the whole superhero genre.

How exactly are the Marvel movies homogeneous? Does linking them together make it so?

They have usually been surprisingly good so I guess one can say they are rather “homogeneous.”

Yep, Thor: The Dark World, starring the relatively stoic Chris Hemsworth is TOTALLY the same movie as Iron Man 3, starring the uber-sarcastic attention-challenged Robert Downey, Jr. (shakes head)

And, like, they’d TOTALLY market the next Thor movie with the left-field song choice of “Hooked on a Feeling” as underscoring for the trailer.

I mean, “homogenous.” Really?

And furthermore — a raccoon! A talking raccoon that likes to shoot things! EVERY Marvel movie has one of those! (Well, they don’t, but they *should.*)

I mean, “homogenous.” Really? “Anti-Auteur.” Really? Did somebody not tell Marvel that Shane Black and James Gunn are both idiosyncratic directors with their own personal visions of pop culture?

They’re typically fairly homogenous in their plotting and pacing, and while the films each work with the tropes of a variety of genres on a surface level (which isn’t a criticism, mind; it’s one of my favorite things about the Marvel Studios films), the lighting is typically exactly the same, the way they’re shot, etc…

I like the Marvel Studios filmmaking system, which typically combines relatively strong, simple blockbuster film writing with excellent casting, but it’s also a system tailor-made to make the movies FEEL similar. You’ll never get a THE DARK KNIGHT or even a PUNISHER: WAR ZONE – but you also won’t get a GREEN LANTERN now that they’ve got their system down pat.

Again, I’m a big fan of the films, but they’re definitely homogenous, and that’s very much on purpose.

As for this news… well, it’s definitely sad tidings, as Wright is one of the most fascinating filmmakers working today on a stylistic level, and this seemed like a passion project for him that could have resulted in something genuinely great. I’m not shocked, exactly – the more successful Marvel’s formula got, the less likely they would be to deviate from it, I suppose – but I am disappointed. This was their chance to begin to innovate again.

Do you guys even watch movies other than blockbusters? Marvel films have a “house style” that’s pretty apparent to anyone outside of Beat commenters, I guess.

Think “homogenous” not in the sense of story elements or characters, but in the way their films are scripted, shot, and edited. This isn’t rocket science. It’s film 101.

Ha CJ, you beat me to the punch. Ignore my comment. Read his.

I’m not really a cinema person, so I can’t address the issue of homogeneity on that level. I’m just a guy who goes to the movies, and … I’m finding myself kinda starting to get bored with them. Sure, they’re mostly well-done, but they’re well-done in pretty much the same way. Going to this month’s opening weekend is less like a special event, and more like watching another episode of CSI: I know what to expect, and I’ll probably get it. Heck, Guardians of the Galaxy is the only Marvel Movie on this year’s slate that I’ve actually been excited about seeing, because it’s finally one that isn’t about the Xpidengers.

At the risk of stereotyping, I can’t help wondering if those who think that each of these superhero FX films is uniquely fresh and different, are the same people who’ve been eagerly reading the same superhero comics every month since the 1980s. So, maybe not the best judges of originality and variety?

I always thought one of the strengths of the Marvel movies was they let the directors get their fingerprints on the films. Favreau’s Iron Man has a different look and feel than Black’s. Johnston brought his over the top classic Rocketeer look to the first Captain America which was traded for a more grounded modern action film approach in the Russos’ sequel. One of the almost impossible things Whedon had to do was to bring characters from different genres of film together in The Avengers and make them all seem like they fit into the same world. He did it so well that it made it seem easy in retrospect. Wright would have brought his own style to Ant Man and I’m sorry we won’t get to see that. Looking forward to whatever he does in the future.

This “house style” claim is some of the biggest bullshit. But then again there are apparently film auteurs and people who have taken “film 101″ who feel different.

For the commenters who don’t see the homogeneity in Marvel’s films that the rest of us do, think of it more as a recipe. If you have a favorite cookie recipe, sometimes you make them plain, sometimes you add chocolate chips, and sometimes you add peanut butter chips. Each one has a marginally different flavor because of the different chips that are used, yet each one is still, at its base, essentially the same cookie at that most basic level.

That’s pretty much how a lot of us view the Marvel films. This isn’t necessarily meant to be a pejorative comment. The reason people use recipes is because it allows them to predictably recreate things that they like (while allowing for variation around the margins). And as much as I may like cookies (and in this case I do like Marvel’s films), sometimes I want a dessert that has a different, more complex, less sweet flavor. The Marvel system doesn’t allow for that.

Does it need to allow for that variety? Especially as DC/Warner seems to be establishing their own specific recipe/house style for super-hero films (the darker, more melancholy tone of the Dark Knight Trilogy and Man of Steel that seems to be very much a deliberate counter-point to Marvel’s brighter tone)? That’s for the marketplace to decide.

““Joss said, ‘I wish there was more James Gunn in this script,’ ” recalls Gunn, speaking from the set of the upcoming Marvel space opera, in theatres Aug. 1.

Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige agreed with Whedon’s assessment: the script needed more of Gunn’s uniquely weird perspective.

“And I was like, ‘It’s your funeral, let’s do it,’ ” says Gunn.”

But I guess they’re lying, because Marvel really really really really doesn’t want any unique input from its directors.
(From http://jam.canoe.ca/Movies/2014/05/19/21681371.html )

I’m with Heidi on this one and frankly the sheer defensiveness of a lot of these comments suggests the psychology of folks who are comforted by safety and consistency and threatened by people who say that very consistency is kinda lame.

Every Marvel Movie: The entire world is doomed and only ONE MAN can save us.
(unless it’s the Avengers, then it’s several people, but mainly The Hulk)

Ironically, the only film that doesn’t follow that script is the one that kicked off the Marvel era of filmmaking: IRON MAN.

I bet Heidi is right on this. It’s a real bummer that Edgar Wright is off ANT-MAN and the only way an ANT-MAN flick could work would be if it were totally quirky. Kinda sucks.