Had things panned out differently, Edgar Wright would have helmed Ant-Man for Marvel Studios. Ultimately, creative decisions got in the way, but it's not the only Marvel franchise to have crossed the filmmaker's desk.
Talking on the red carpet for The Running Man, veteran producer Simon Kinberg revealed that he repeatedly offered Wright the chance to helm an X-Men movie. As a reminder, Kinberg either wrote or produced every X-Men movie between 2006 and 2020, leading to him stepping behind the camera to helm Dark Phoenix.
That was panned by critics and fans alike, something we can't imagine being the case had Wright decided to say yes to Kinberg's offers to put his spin on the mutant team.
Instead, the Shaun of the Dead and Baby Driver helmer repeatedly turned the producer down. "I’ve been trying to make a movie with Edgar Wright for over 25 years," Kinberg said. "We met when we were young guys in Hollywood, just starting out together, and I’ve been such a huge fan of his."
He added, "I’ve sent him things over the years, many, many [things], X-Men movies, all kinds of things, and he always said no."
Things changed with The Running Man, but which X-Men movies did Wright say no to? X-Men: Days of Future Past, perhaps? How about The New Mutants or even Deadpool? Here's hoping someone asks Wright down the line, though his new movie's press tour has now ended.
However, some recent remarks from Wright about being offered "revisionist superhero" projects leads us to believe it could be the Merc with the Mouth.
"You’re not still losing sleep over that, are you?" Wright recently joked when he was asked about Ant-Man. "I didn’t regret my decision to leave at all. I had started working on that film long before even 'Iron Man' came out."
"By the time it came around, they had established the brand, the continuity, and even a certain way of making a movie," he continued. "So the chance to do something really different was going away."
Wright hasn't taken a crack at another superhero property since, and as of now, still has no intentions of doing so. "Several years afterwards, I’d get scripts saying, 'This is a revisionist superhero movie!' And I’d think, aren’t they all revisionist now? It would be more groundbreaking to make a straight-up one. So no, 12 years later, I’m still on what I call a 'cape break.'"
You can hear more from Kinberg on Wright's X-Men near-miss in the player below.