While out promoting the home release of Ant-Man on Blu-Ray and DVD to USA Today, Ant-Man Director Peyton Reed stated that he had received several letters from concerned parents regarding the fate of our dear chum Antony. You might remember Antony as Ant-Man’s trusty…um…steed? Sidekick? Ant-Buddy? Whatever role he filled, Reed said there was a great deal of questions and worrying directed at our formian friend.
“And then the further we got into it [the script], the more we liked the idea of this sacrifice – could we get an emotional reaction from an audience in a movie called Ant-Man from an ant dying? It started to intrigue us. Everybody steps on ants every day, but this really appealed to us, me particularly, and we were really able to pull it off. It’s a weird little tragic moment. There’s a couple of moms who have written and said, “My son is distraught about Antony dying. Can you please just tell me, did he really die?” And I could have said, “Well, he did die. Maybe now’s a good time to explain to your child that sometimes there are casualties. “But what I actually said was the average lifespan of an ant is something like 12 weeks, so he was probably going to die pretty soon anyway.” Wow, Peyton Reed doesn’t mess around when it comes to laying down the laws of nature. I guess we all had Bambi to show us how cruel the world was…now these ‘chitlins’ have Ant-Man!
Now that we know what happened, have they started work on the sequel to Ant-Man? The answer is a resounding yes and it sounds like the tone and setting of the movie will be of a marked change according to Reed. “I’m doubly excited. We’re going to do some very, very different things in the next movie and we’ve set up stuff in the first movie that we can have a lot of fun with in the second movie and go both bigger and smaller at the same time.”
! Apparently, he received quite a few letters!){kind=link}