May 2014 wasn’t a good month for filmmaker Edgar Wright. The director decided to painfully walk away from Marvel’s “Ant-Man” film, a project he had spearheaded to make with the then-fledgling company and spent eight years developing it. The move was heartache for the director, but as Marvel wanted something … potentially a lot more compromised, so Wright had to stick to his guns and bow out. While there were some—misplaced—talk that Wright would be tackling his adaptation of “The Night Stalker” with Johnny Depp next, that’s turned out not to be the case.
Instead Wright is going back to the long-gestating “Baby Driver,” a project he’s been developing since circa 2008. And maybe it was “the musical” that Wright was hinting at for several years now. Deadline calls “Baby Driver” a “collision of crime, action, music and sound.” The movie is as far away as can be from the Disney/Marvel corporate arm and safely in the hands of Working Title partners Tim Bevan, and Eric Fellner are producing with Nira Park—the same trio that helped Wright make his trilogy of Cornetto Films.
No casting details yet, but it’s apparently on the fast track. As Deadline notes, Working Title has a deal with Universal, so like “The World’s End,” it’s a good bet this movie could come out of the Focus Features wing. It’s good to see that the “Ant-Man” imbroglio only side-tracked the filmmaker very briefly. One has to wonder if Wright will ever go back to “The Night Stalker” project because it is at Disney, the parent company of Marvel that is rumored to have put the squeeze on Wright’s version of “Ant-Man”—though he might just see it as the dirty business of working with studios and not care. It makes sense that Depp wouldn’t be in that one next anyhow, the actors has big tentpoles like “Alice In Wonderland 2” and “Pirates of the Caribbean 5” that will be taking up his life for the foreseeable future.