Edgar Wright's 'Ant-Man' Could Be Marvel's Third Film In 2014

Marvel Studios has been fairly solid in its plan to release two films per year over the next few years. But there's a movie that might help the outfit change that plan: Edgar Wright's Ant-Man, which made its very early debut last weekend at Comic Con via impressive test-footage Wright shot just a couple weeks back.

Marvel co-president Louis D'Esposito (director of the new short Item 47) talked in an interview about a couple different subjects, including the possibility of squeezing Ant-Man into the 2014 schedule, should Wright be able to jump right from his production The World's End to the Marvel film.

D'Esposito covers a few different topics in his interview, but here's what he had to say about packing one year's schedule a little more tight than others:

That might be an opportunity where we do a third film, depending on his schedule when he finishes World's End. But he's such a competent filmmaker; the script is in great shape. The test will prove a lot of things on the visual effects front: how do we handle the shrinking, obviously, and the scale issues, because when he's small he's a half-inch. So we're gonna work that out, maybe that's when we do a third film.

Presumably, there are multiple reasons to get Wright behind the camera for Ant-Man sooner rather than later, and once the film is done Marvel won't want to sit on the picture. The good news is that, based on what we saw, Ant-Man would be a movie that could easily play outside the typical summer tentpole season — it could be Marvel's entry into the fall calendar. And while he doesn't mention a year specifically, the time frame would have to be 2014, before The Avengers 2 comes around. (And what are the chances that Marvel is considering Wright as a director for that sequel?)

And on that front, the co-pres of Marvel also talks about the idea of giving small Marvel characters time in lesser-budgeted movies that might be rated R. That doesn't sound very likely, as the cost of marketing a movie is high enough that if Marvel is going to put muscle behind something, they want it to have the potential to be huge. So it's going to be tentpole stuff all the way. That said, he also mentions that people seem to respond better to original content (such as his short film Item 47) than deleted scenes on DVDs, so we can expect to see more of those.

Check out the view interview from Collider below.