Now that the two-week countdown has officially commenced, we’re beginning to learn more and more about Marvel’s Ant-Man and the Wasp with each passing day.
For instance, we know its projected opening in North America ($75M) and the ways in which it bridges the gap between Civil War and the recently-released Avengers: Infinity War.
But whereas Peyton Reed’s original sleeper hit was best described as a heist film, Ant-Man and the Wasp doesn’t fit into any one genre, necessarily, with Marvel’s executive producer Stephen Broussard revealing that the teeny-tiny sequel weans its inspiration from a whole host of film genres, though he ultimately considers this to be a “one bad night” kind of movie.
Allow him to explain, courtesy of Screen Rant:
The first film was a heist film, right. It was kind of this crime movie and we like – the Ant-Man franchise kind of lives in this crime adjacent world, you know, and so a lot of the films that we started talking about just as like inspiration and kind of how we wanna approach it and how we wanna do something new the same way, the heist movie felt new to the MCU. I don’t really know if it’s like a genre unto itself but movies have always been called ‘one bad night’ when something just goes terrible and just kind of spirals out of control.
Continuing on, Broussard then name-dropped one or two inspirations that were used as touchstones, creatively speaking, during the creation of Ant-Man and the Wasp.
After Hours is a great touchstone. I like Go. Go is a great movie. You know, Adventures in Babysitting for the lighter fare kind of thing and it just kind of feels like it started so simple but then it kind of just goes up and up and up and then you have a character trying to race to get, put it all back in the box before they get caught kind of thing. And then the circumstance of that house arrest kind of gave a great framework for that. So, Hank and Hope come in and sort of scoop [Scott] up on this journey and he’s kind of out of bounds, not where he should be, trying to keep that part of his life from getting caught but also trying to help them with this, with this adventure. I’m a big Elmore Leonard fan, you know, in the way that there’s all these sort of colorful characters kind of colliding with one another, you know.
On July 6th, Ant-Man and the Wasp zooms into theaters, and it’ll mark the 20th installment in the ongoing Marvel Cinematic Universe. Here’s to the next 20…
