More Ant-Man movie details

So this is a new bit. I don't actually know if I talked about it when it started to come up last month but Paul Rudd is confirmed as Edgar Wright's Ant-Man in the 2015 Marvel movie Ant-Man. This still left Marvel fans wondering which Ant-Man Rudd would be playing, as there were three options for the role (but really two major options, no one was really banking on it being Eric O'Grady). Well it seems as if Marvel and Wright are ready to close the doors on those questions as they've just cast Hollywood legend Michael Douglas as Hank Pym, leaving Rudd in the Scott Lang role. The way Lang has worked in the past, for those unfamiliar, is that he becomes Ant-Man after stealing Pym's suit to use it to try to save his daughter Cassie who has a lung condition and requires expensive treatment. Eventually it gets sorted and Pym gives Lang his blessing to become Ant-Man full time, leading to Lang's affiliation with the Fantastic Four (as seen most recently in the current FF series) and to membership on the Avengers. To give away a little too much, probably, he's killed in the AVENGERS DISASSEMBLED storyline that would lead to the major HOUSE OF M business when Scarlet Witch goes a little crazy and ends up accidentally killing members of the Avengers including Lang. He's brought back in the events of 2011's YOUNG AVENGERS: CHILDREN'S CRUSADE when...okay, maybe I'm getting a little too deep into something that does not matter considering this post was originally just about casting news and its implications. Let's get to that then.

So obviously the biggest news of this whole announcement is that Michael Douglas, who will be 70 this year, seems to age Hank Pym out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now, like or dislike Pym, it's hard to argue that he's an important character in the Marvel Universe. In the comics, he's a founding Avenger, he invented Pym particles, and he created Ultron, among other things (probably too bad for him that he's pretty well-known for striking his wife on a particularly bad occasion). He's also not 70 years old in the comics. This changes a lot of what people (me) may have been predicting about the movie. It's almost weirder that they're leaving Pym in but making him 70 than it is to just make it Lang and kind of combine the two characters. I suppose this is a way to keep Pym in the MCU but to de-complicate things a bit instead of having two potential Ant-Mans running around. There are also some other rumors floating around after Edgar Wright posted posted a screencap from Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes on his website which showed a character grabbing for the Ant-Man mask. The episode the shot was taken from is entitled "To Steal an Ant-Man" and features Lang's first appearance on the show, wherein he steals the Ant-Man costume, which caused plenty of people to think a week ago that Rudd would play Lang and not Pym. However, sources like Hollywood Reporter speculated it might mean more than that, as that particular episode also invoked, for the first time in that series, Iron Fist and Luke Cage. I waved that off at first as maybe reaching a little far, even after the article went on to link the whole thing to Iron Fist and Luke Cage's upcoming Netflix series, but I'm not as convinced now. First and foremost: can Ant-Man sustain his own movie? Second: Avengers: EMH was very clearly a sort of testing ground for future MCU concepts so it's not entirely farfetched. Third: Lang, in the comics, had a relationship with Jessica Jones for a time, also slated to get her own Netflix series, which could potentially tie everything together pretty nicely. OKAY, maybe I'm getting a little farfetched now, but maybe-OH MAN, EDGAR WRIGHT DIRECTING A MOVIE WITH IRON FIST IN IT WOULD BE THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED.