Paul Rudd’s ‘Ant-Man’ gets high praise, but a sequel is iffy
My favorite “Ant”
“Ant-Man” doesn’t open until July 17, but KC’s Paul Rudd is having a big week in the limelight. That’s him on the red carpet in Los Angeles, with his co-star, seven-months-pregnant Evangeline Lilly, at the movie’s Los Angeles premiere. Then he headed over to the El Capitan Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard to be immortalized with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
Meanwhile …
Midwest charm
After the “Ant-Man” premiere, James Gunn, director of Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” (and a St. Louis native), took to Facebook to proclaim his “Ant” love and reveal an interesting Paul Rudd tidbit: “Ant-Man may just be my favorite Marvel film since Jon Favreau’s ‘Iron Man’ (well, maybe excluding one film to which I’m partial). Honestly, the movie is a complete blast! I was so happy after seeing it. … Paul Rudd is nuanced and charming and funny and is a surprisingly natural fit as a modern superhero (side-fact — Paul must be a nice guy, because he and I dated the same girl in college, and yet I still love him).” Hmm, we’d love to know more.
Gunn also praised KC’s own David Dastmalchian (and posted a shot of the two of them at the premiere after-party) : “David plays a Russian hacker in the movie, and nearly every single line out of his mouth gets a laugh.” They’re both busy with the filming of Gunn’s next movie, the horror thriller “The Belko Experiment.”
A crowded universe
Collider asked Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige about the chances of an “Ant-Man” sequel: “The answer is I don’t really know. We’re entering territory that’s an incredible problem to have, which is too many franchises to navigate. … We’d never want to stretch ourselves too thin that we’re not able to make them in the way we believe they should be made.”
Feige’s summary of all those spinning plates: “We literally just crossed the halfway mark of ‘(Captain America:) Civil War’ last week, it’s day 42 or 43 of 80. We start filming ‘Doctor Strange’ in London in November. We start shooting ‘Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 2’ in February-March. We start filming ‘Thor: Ragnarok’ and ‘Spider-Man’ around the same time, around June of next year.”
By the way, Feige says that with 19-year-old Tom Holland (“The Impossible,” TV’s “Wolf Hall”) as the new Spidey, the reboot will have a John Hughes vibe. “It’s the soap opera in high school, and those supporting characters, that are interesting. … Not that we can make a John Hughes movie — only John Hughes could — but we’re inspired by him.”
| Sharon Hoffmann, shoffmann@kcstar.com
This story was originally published July 1, 2015 at 2:28 PM with the headline "Paul Rudd’s ‘Ant-Man’ gets high praise, but a sequel is iffy."