Even though it’s a sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp looks like it will be a fresh start for Ant-Man, and it looks like Marvel is happy with everything from the original except for the Edgar Wright hiccup. They’re bringing back Peyton Reed to direct, and now Deadline reports that Andrew Barrer & Gabriel Ferrari will team up with Paul Rudd and Adam McKay to pen script for the sequel. While Rudd and McKay were officially credited on Ant-Man, Barrer and Ferrari did six months of uncredited rewrite work on the movie while it was in production.
According to Deadline, Barrer and Ferrari will work with Rudd and McKay to break the story, and then Rudd, Barrer, and Ferrari will go and write the script. Obviously, that’s not exactly the workflow of the first movie, but the same players are in place, and given Ant-Man’s solid worldwide success (over $500 million worldwide isn’t too shabby considering the lack of stars or that the character hadn’t been introduced in a previous Marvel movie).
It will be interesting to see what this quartet puts together under new circumstances. My understanding with Ant-Man is that the skeleton of the story belonged to Wright and Joe Cornish, and the set pieces were immovable because pre-viz was already in process when Wright left the project (except for the fight between Ant-Man and Falcon, which was one of McKay’s additions to the movie). Will the writers be doing another heist film, or will they be going for another genre? We’ll have toe wait and see, but personally, I’d like to see them take a stab at screwball romantic comedy.
Barrer & Ferrari’s other credits include being part of the Transformers writers room, and specifically working on an animated prequel to the Transformers films. They also landed on the Black List with their first script, Die in a Gunfight.
Ant-Man and the Wasp opens July 6, 2018.
