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‘Ant-Man’ crawls forward

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Marvel Comics fans who’ve been clamoring for Edgar Wright to get to the insect-like business of writing ‘Ant-Man’ may have a reason to feel happy. The director this week picked up the pen on the movie’s script for the first time in more than two years.

Wright, who came on in 2006 to write and direct a take on the arthropodal superhero, said Tuesday in an interview with 24 Frames that with much of the international promotion for ‘Scott Pilgrim vs. the World’ now behind him, he’s free again to write on ‘Ant-Man’ -- the first time he’ll do that since he started developing ‘Pilgrim.’ (He had previously written a first draft of the script.)

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In fact, the director had just come from a dinner meeting with Marvel production head Kevin Feige, where the subject of the offbeat Marvel property was in the air.

Speaking by phone from London -- in an interview about a program he’s curating at the New Beverly; more on that in a separate post -- Wright was coy about plot details for ‘Ant-Man.’ (In the past he’s described it as not quite a comedy but with humorous elements.) The film centers on Marvel scientist Hank Pym who, in various incarnations of the comic, could shrink down to the size of an insect to solve crimes, in one iteration with a female companion named The Wasp.

But Wright did say that the ‘Ant-Man’ script, which he’s writing with ‘Adventures of Tintin’ collaborator Joe Cornish, can afford to be more offbeat and, well, small.

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‘This one’s not about about the urgency of summer tentpoles and things going into production without a script,’ said Wright, who approached Marvel with the ‘Ant-Man’ idea. ‘It’s slightly different than that. ‘

Among the creative issues facing Wright and Cornish: making a character that diminutive seem larger than life. (Humor-inflected superheroes -- especially insectile ones -- will face a key test this weekend with the opening of ‘The Green Hornet.’)

Meanwhile, for those who love the genre sendups created by Wright and Simon Pegg -- ‘Shaun of the Dead’ and ‘Hot Fuzz’ -- Wright said that he and Pegg ‘have a [new] idea’ and that ‘at some point I’ve got to sit down with Simon and write something.’ But after, Marvel fans may hope, Wright finishes ‘Ant-Man.’

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--Steven Zeitchik

twitter.com/ZeitchikLAT

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