ANT-MAN Featurette Focuses On 'The Falcon'; Peyton Reed Discusses His Cameo And 'Giant-Man'
The Ant-Man goodies keep on coming, as we have a new featurette focusing on The Falcon's (Anthony Mackie) role in Ant-Man. As if that wasn't cool enough, director Peyton Reed talks box office success, choosing the right Avenger, and Giant-Man in a brand new interview...
Ant-Man recently exceeded expectations by sailing past the $500 million mark at the worldwide box office thanks to a very successful opening in China. How did Peyton Reed - a director brought on at very much the last minute to replace Edgar Wright - feel to see his movie succeed? "Obviously I didn’t want to be the first Marvel movie that tanked, but it was nice," he tells USA Today. "I feel like audiences responded to what we were trying to do, which was to do a little bit more of an intimate superhero movie about fathers and daughters." The filmmaker was then asked about the decision to include Anthony Mackie's Falcon (who gets the spotlight in the featurette below), and had this to say about why he ended up being the right Avenger to make a cameo.
"Bringing Falcon into the movie really was when Paul Rudd and Adam McKay were starting the rewrites and we were talking about elements that we wanted to add. We were doing a heist movie and one of the tropes is that trial by fire where everything is organized with the heist but, oh, there’s this one piece of technology we don’t have and we have to send our hero into this situation to get it and he might not be fully prepared. It made sense to pit Scott Lang against something or somebody before he was really ready. We talked a lot about who it could be and Falcon just felt like the right thing. We all loved Anthony Mackie in (the Captain America sequel) Winter Soldier, and we all loved the idea of Mackie and Rudd squaring off. What would the combination of their two powers be like? It started to feel organic to our movie. Marvel never ever came and said, "You’ve gotta work Thor into the movie!" There was none of that stuff. We came to them saying, "This feels like it could be very very cool." And as a kid who grew up reading those comic books, that's the stuff I love. Also, Anthony Mackie is very funny in our movie, and I like the idea that Scott Lang is tasked with getting this piece of equipment, he’s got to come up against the Falcon but he’s also a fanboy so he’s kind of apologizing when he’s fighting him."
After commenting on the deleted scenes and Antony (RIP) - which you can find by heading over to the site - Reed was then asked about the possibility of introducing Giant-Man, a transformation Scott Lang is of course rumoured to undergo in Captain America: Civil War next year. "That’s the thing about Hank Pym and Scott Lang in the comics. There’s so much stuff — there’s like 50 years of source material to choose from, so we’re being smart about what we’re going to do with the movie. But there’s some very weird stuff in store for these characters." What do you think?