In a really weird and disappointing piece of news, Edgar Wright has stepped away as director of Ant-Man. The upcoming Marvel Studios movie is expected to be released in July of 2015, and it’s biggest contributor is now gone. Wright had been working on and off on the film for the past few years, and shaped what Phase 3 was going to become. He had put out test footage and locked down a solid cast. It seems that something else must be afoot when you say they parted ways over “creative differences.”

This is the word from Marvel.

[box_light]Marvel and Edgar Wright jointly announced today that the studio and director have parted ways on ANT-MAN due to differences in their vision of the film. The decision to move on is amicable and does not impact the release date on July 17, 2015. A new director will be announced shortly.[/box_light]

I have read from a few different sources that the real reason that Wright is off the film is due in part to Marvel’s re-writes of the script. It seems that the Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish script wasn’t “true enough to Marvel’s core values” and they had a couple of low level writers take a crack at it. When the script was finished and handed into Wright and Cornish this week, they were so turned off by it and Marvel and Kevin Feige’s apparent lack of faith in them as filmmakers, that it made Wright walk away from the film.

Is that the true story? We may not ever find out. All I know is that this seems like a pretty horrible decision on someone’s part, but we really won’t know until we see a trailer, probably at the end of this year. Who will direct the film, is still up in the air.

Ant-Man is still supposed to star: Paul Rudd, Michael Douglas,  Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Peña, and Patrick Wilson.

~Chaz