In one of the earlier reports about the casting of Michael Douglas as Hank Pym in Ant-Man, Variety speculated that the veteran actor may well turn out to be the film’s villain.They’ve since retracted that part of the article–likely because they misunderstood the release, but possibly because they know something we don’t–and aren’t supposed to.Certainly that’s what happened last time around with Robert Redford on Captain America: The Winter Soldier. He’s the villain, but since that’s not immediately evident in the film, the studio tried to keep it quiet for a while. Speculation right out of the gate, though, was confirmed when Redford eventually spoke about the film and immediately confirmed the suspicions. We’ll see how it goes for Douglas.With Scott Lang in the Ant-Man role for most of the film, Douglas’s character seems, based on the language of the studio’s press release and comments made years ago by director Edgar Wright, to be the designer of the Ant-Man technology, as he is in the comics. Certainly that could go either way–it could work for him to mentor Lang a bit, or to turn out to be a bad guy, or both.How does director Edgar Wright describe the relationship? Well, it could shed a little light…”Well, the thing is that what we want to do, the idea that we have for the adaptation is to actually involve both [characters],” Wright told Superhero Hype in 2006. “Is to have a film that basically is about Henry Pym and Scott Lang, so you actually do a prologue where you see Pym as Ant-Man in action in the 60′s, in sort of Tales to Astonish mode basically, and then the contemporary, sort of flash-forward, is Scott Lang’s story, and how he comes to acquire the suit, how he crosses paths with Henry Pym, and then, in an interesting sort of Machiavellian way, teams up with him. So it’s like an interesting thing, like the Marvel Premiere one that I read which is Scott Lang’s origin, it’s very brief like a lot of those origin comics are, and in a way, the details that are skipped through in the panels and the kind of thing we’d spend half an hour on.”
