Peyton Reed Would Love to Create an Ant-Man Ride for Disneyland

Over the summer, Marvel introduced the world to a new hero that, while small, was a huge hit. We are talking of course about Ant-Man, the wildly entertaining film starring Paul Rudd, as a thief who teams up with a wizened inventor played by Michael Douglas, to steal a formula that allows for some incredible size shifting. The movie is an absolute blast – a smart, funny, wonderfully weird addition to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. (Ant-Man will return for an appearance in next year’s feverishly anticipated Captain America: Civil War. We saw footage of him at the D23 Expo presentation; he’ll fit in well.)

To celebrate the release of the film on Blu-ray, Digital HD, and Disney Movies Anywhere, we sat down with Peyton Reed, the director of Ant-Man, to talk about the film’s success, missing deleted scenes, and what to expect from the sequel. Be warned, though, spoilers follow.

Were you taken aback by how Ant-Man was embraced on a global level?

Well I was obviously pleased. Paul and I went to Japan and China. Both countries are amazing. I’d never been to either one. And with Japan it was amazing to see how they embraced the father/daughter aspect of the movie. That was the thing, in Japan, the one sheet is Ant-Man on the desk and Cassie looking at him. That was really how they marketed the movie there. In China, it was a whole other thing. It’s this gigantic emerging market. They said, “We think this could do really well here.” But we were totally unprepared for how well it did. I was thrilled. The Marvel movies set an incredibly high bar for everything – the quality of the movies, how they’re received, and the box office. So I’m really pleased with how we did. Ant-Man is, for the average moviegoer, an obscure character. You could say the same thing about Iron Man. When the first movie came out, people considered him a B-level hero and that is absolutely not the case. In hindsight it seems like a no-brainer, but these are difficult characters to visualize and sell. Like Captain America. Corey Stoll was talking about how in the comic books, Captain America is potentially the cheesiest character. And he’s turned out to be the most compelling guy in the whole MCU. It’s amazing.

Let’s talk about something that’s not on the Blu-ray, which is this much talked-about Cuba prologue.

Well, it became Panama.

Why isn’t it there?

Originally the movie opened, and this is in Edgar [Wright] and Joe [Cornish]’s drafts, with a Hank Pym-era Ant-Man prologue in 1962, so it was very much a Cuban Missile Crisis Ant-Man. A decade later, when the movie got made, that timeline didn’t work anymore. To put it in Cuba in the ‘60s, Hank Pym would have been 80. So we thought a lot about it and decided to make it Panama in 1989, and in our minds it was the summer before America going in and doing what they did in Panama. We liked that idea of tying in SHIELD, and they had established a presence down there, but also if they had betrayed Hank Pym and attempted to steal his formula; they were hoarding that stuff down there and maybe mining in the hills of Panama to find more Pym particles. It turned out really well and we shot it, and when we were putting together the movie, I came into the movie saying, “I want it to be under two hours and to really move.” And as we were shooting, we found a more succinct way to introduce Hank Pym and it really felt disconnected from the rest of the movie. It’s a cool sequence on its own but it felt disconnected. The reason it’s not on the Blu-ray is that early on we decided it wouldn’t be in the movie, so we didn’t finish the visual effects and without that it doesn’t work so well. There are glimpses of it in the extended scenes. Maybe it’ll see the light of day at some point. It’s a really cool scene.

When the movie came out, you hinted that proof of Janet’s existence might exist in the quantum realm at the end of the movie. Can you tell us where that is?

People are already starting to tweet frame grabs of things that people have seen that might be a human figure with wings, so I’ll leave it at that.

You’re the guardian of this character. By the time you get Scott Lang back for Ant-Man and the Wasp, he’ll have gone on some other adventures with the other characters. Do you check in on that stuff?

It’s exciting, but it’s also very complicated. When the Russo brothers were formulating what Captain America: Civil War was going to be, they came into the cutting room and I showed them Scott Lang as Ant-Man, so they could get a feel for the tone of Ant-Man and the tone of that character, so they could figure out where to use him in Civil War. It definitely behooves every director in this world to keep abreast and solicit information about what’s going on with these characters. Because our next movie, Ant-Man and the Wasp, will have to pick Scott up from a certain place and I think that movie has to work on its own. I really felt strongly about that on Ant-Man – that it has to work whether or not the viewer has seen all those other movies. I feel the same way about Ant-Man and the Wasp. Things will have happened with Scott and the universe at large in-between the movies, but we’ll figure out how to focus it back in on these characters.

How important was it to call the sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp and not Ant-Man 2?

I love it for a number of reasons. One, we clearly set up [Hope’s] arc in the first movie. She sees the suit at the end. We know she’s capable of it and we know that she’s been sidelined because her father was overprotective and now we’re going to see her as a fully-fledged hero. We know who she is and where she comes from, so it will be fun to continue that. And as a comics fan, with an exception of a handful of the first issues, Ant-Man and Wasp are a team in the comics and that’s what it should be: Ant-Man and the Wasp! In the comics, they fight together and they also have a personal dynamic. The title refers to Scott and Hope, but it also has a lot to do with Hank and what has happened with Janet. When you get to the end of Ant-Man, his obsession has been reignited since Scott has made it out of the quantum realm.

Are there things you’re excited to do in the sequel?

Oh yes. What’s exciting is there’s so much source material in terms of the Hank Pym version and he went through a lot of permutations as a hero. And the Marvel writers, you get the feeling that they didn’t quite know what to do with him and were experimenting with his power set and skill set. He could go small, he could go large, and he had some personality conflicts along the way. So I think that’s something we could explore.

You’re a die hard Disney fan. If you could have an Ant-Man attraction at one of the Parks, what would that look like?

Kevin Feige is a huge fan of the “Miracles of Molecules” song and we’ve talked about that old attraction [editor’s note: Adventure Thru Inner Space] that used to be in Tomorrowland and what you could do with the Hank Pym version. Years ago, I had directed the pre-show for the “Honey, I Shrunk the Audience” attraction and I was just down at the California Adventure Park and visited Cars Land for the first time and was amazed by the scale and scope of that thing. That’s the thing that the Disney Parks can do that you can’t do anywhere else. I also went on The Little Mermaid ride and I love that ride. Pirates of the Caribbean, just to go on that ride, it’s so experiential. I would love to do an Ant-Man thing where you put the audience down on that level.

Ant-Man is available now on Blu-ray, Digital HD, and Disney Movies Anywhere.