Ant-Man Channels Spider-Man in High Stakes Deleted Scene (Exclusive)
Though he certainly stands on his own two legs, Ant-Man nearly took a cue from another Marvel hero in his big screen debut this summer.
In the deleted scene from Ant-Man above (which appears on the DVD/Blu-Ray, out on Tuesday), Scott Lang (Paul Rudd) uses his newfound super powers to make his pals some quick money, employing his size-shifting abilities to tip the dice in a game of craps. Spider-Man’s origin story in the 2002 movie famously has Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) engaging in some underground wrestling — a selfish endeavor that cost him his Uncle Ben and taught him that with great power comes great responsibility.
According to Ant-Man director Peyton Reed, the scene above was less about Lang wanting to get rich quick, and more about doing right by his family. But it still wasn’t the right fit for the movie.
“He needs money to pay child support, and this suit clearly is the shortest path between him and this money,’” Reed recently told Yahoo Movies. “So we shot a handful of things. He helps Luis [Michael Pe?a] and the gang gamble, and then I [planned] a sequence where he went straight to a pawn shop and steals jewelry, and that was going to be the first entrance of the ants. It just started to feel like it was dragging the movie. Also there’s no quick way of telling that story of him reverting back to his criminal past, so we ended up punting on it.”
The similarity to the web-slinger — even with the different motivations — didn’t help matters much, either.
“Honestly I think that was one of the reasons we cut it, too,” admitted Reed, a diehard comic book fan. “That was a Marvel trope that had appeared in a lot of the comics, and it appeared in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movie…. And with the character we were creating, with Rudd, it made more sense for him to almost have post-traumatic stress disorder after that first shrinking experience and just wanted to get rid of the suit. It worked better in a comic way and worked better in a plot way.”
Reed, however, wasn’t entirely against working some outside intellectual property into his film, which he took over from director Edgar Wright in 2014. Unlike most Marvel movies, Ant-Man’s climactic battle doesn’t take place in a city center square or outer space, and there’s no billion-dollar price tag associated with the damage. Instead, Ant-Man and villain Yellow Jacket (Cory Stoll) square off in Lang’s daughter’s room, and the centerpiece of their fight is a Thomas the Tank Engine train set that becomes larger-than-life.
A scene from ‘Ant-Man’ (Disney/Marvel)
The filmmaker told Yahoo Movies that getting Thomas — whose likeness is owned by the toymaker Mattel — took a major promise on his part.
“There was always a train set sequence from the early drafts,” he explained. “By the time we were frighteningly close to shooting, we didn’t completely have the rights to Thomas. And Thomas made it way funnier. So we sent the script and the storyboards to the Thomas people. They were into the idea, though they said, 'Thomas isn’t going to kill anybody, right? You’re not going to tie someone to the tracks and have Thomas run over them?’ That was never our intention in the movie. So they loved it, and they were really game.”
As Thomas the Tank Engine knows: With great power comes great responsibility.
Watch the trailer for ‘Ant-Man’ below: