Ant-Man shrinks and controls ants. "We’re going to show you absolutely how that’s cool," director Peyton Reed says. (Marvel)
There are the superheroes everyone knows and loves, the ones kids 
dress up as for Halloween, the ones whose logos and square-jawed faces 
are emblazoned on everything from lunchboxes to dorm-room posters to 
tighty-whities.
And then there is Ant-Man.
The Marvel Comics
 hero — whose suit enables him to shrink to microscopic size and 
communicate with ants — boasts an illustrious nearly 50-year history and
 was a founding member of the Avengers. But in terms of mainstream 
awareness, Ant-Man is to marquee heroes like Batman and Spider-Man 
roughly what a bug is to an elephant. 
Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige has a simple explanation for that: "He hasn't had a movie yet. He hasn't made his debut."
With
 "Ant-Man," in theaters July 17, the character is finally ready for his 
(extremely zoomed-in) close-up. The film stars Paul Rudd as Scott Lang, a
 thief and ex-con who becomes the protege of Hank Pym (Michael Douglas),
 creator of the Ant-Man technology. Together, the two work to thwart 
rival inventor Darren Cross (Corey Stoll), who has developed his own, 
even more powerful Yellowjacket suit.
As befitting an unconventional superhero, "Ant-Man" is far from a 
typical origin tale, according to director Peyton Reed, best known for 
such comedies as "Bring It On" and "Yes Man."
"It's a sort of a 
dual redemption story between two guys and their daughters with the 
structure of a heist movie with a science-fiction concept but with a 
real comedic rhythm to it," Reed said. He laughed. "You know, one of 
those movies."
If that log line sounds complicated, the history of the project is 
even more tangled. The idea of an "Ant-Man" movie first arose in the 
late 1980s but didn't pick up steam until 2006, when Marvel hired Edgar 
Wright — the director of quirky genre deconstructions like "Shaun of the
 Dead" and "Hot Fuzz" — to bring his own script, co-written with Joe 
Cornish, to the screen.
After years of development, the film was 
on the brink of starting production in May 2013 when Marvel and Wright 
jointly announced that Wright was leaving the project due to 
"differences in their vision of the film." With a release date in place 
but no director or approved script, comic-book fans — many of whom had 
been excited over the prospect of Wright's film — wondered if "Ant-Man" 
could end up being squashed. 
"There was a lot of scrambling to just figure out what the next step 
would be," said Rudd, who quickly helped recruit writer-director Adam 
McKay, with whom he'd worked on the "Anchorman" films, to collaborate on
 a new draft of the script. Within weeks, Reed — who had earlier been in
 the running to helm "Guardians of the Galaxy" — signed on to direct the
 film.
"It's easy to look at that time and say it was chaotic," 
said Rudd, who put in months of training to develop a more superheroic 
physique. "But while [Wright's exit] was obviously a personal bummer — 
I'm an Edgar fan and I'm here because of him — there are also a lot of 
positive things that happened as a result. No. 1 being that we got 
Peyton."
  | 
Paul Rudd   
Chris Pizzello / Invision 
   
 | 
Source