Reedless to say.

Film This news is over a day old, but since I've written about this before I thought I'd offer an update to my original opinion too.

Peyton Reed to direct Ant-Man.

Oh, well, good. He was originally attached to the last attempt at producing a Fantastic Four franchise before the Tim Story iteration so he knows what it's like to be replaced on a superhero project and he has some excellent to decent films on his CV (Bring It On, Down with Love and Yes Man) as well as a bunch of television work so he's happy to be a gun for hire. 

He's not directed anything on this scale, assuming the project has scale in the traditional MARVEL sense, but that also continues the general MARVEL process of hiring directors who tend to be happier working with actors (see the Russos).

On this basis of this new hire, here's my modified impression of the Edgar Wright thing. It's not that much different from what I wrote last time but I'm in a slightly warmer mood towards MARVEL Studios now (not least after spending hours this afternoon reading about the hash which was made of the comics version of the 'verse in the 80s & 90s).

Essentially my feeling is that it's probably fair enough that they don't want to stray too much into giving directors an individual voice when trying to create a cohesive universe.

In this massive website about the Fantastic Four, they talk about how one of the reasons MARVEL worked so well narratively speaking in the 60s and 70s is because there was a concerted effort to create realistic continuity across the titles and more importantly for the characters to age realistically and have history and to grow and learn.

Then in the 80s & 90s, they decided that in fact that's the last thing they wanted and it was left to individual voices on different comics to decide how best to effectively create reboots with the unfortunate consequence that continuity went out of the window, retcons agogo and it became increasingly difficult as a reader to keep up with things because titles seemed to go out of their way to contradict one another with some writers on different lines seemingly in open warfare with each other about visions of what characters are supposed to be like even to the point of level of maturity.

One of the keys to the MCU is that there's a concerted effort to create realistic continuity across the titles and more importantly for the characters to age realistically and have history and to grow and learn.

If you flip the Wright situation its head, he's hired in 2006 before Iron Man's a success, then given every opportunity to modify his vision so it fits the new regime right up to the point that the thing has been cast and has a start date, but he's still under the impression that his vision counts on this occasion and when he and Cornish still can't produce a version of the script which fits with the vision of the people who, to be fair, are financing the thing (though admittedly at this point we don't know how they divert), they step in and get someone else to write what they want and probably need instead.

Not liking that, he walks and they hire someone who will produce a film which fits in their idea of what the MCU is. Again, fair enough.

To a degree you could then argue that this means the death of creativity.  On the other you could argue that the overall creative endeavour of creating a cohesive screen universe on a scale which hasn't been attempted before in quite this way (across films and television at least) is taking priority.