The one movie Edgar Wright vowed he’d never watch: “No, I’m good”
The brilliant thing about Edgar Wright is that the guy is the epitome of the thought process that dictates you should ‘make what you’d like to see’.
Every title he produces bleeds with the passion and knowledge he has for movies and pop culture, from action to comedy to zombie flicks, and anyone who caught his excellent and unfairly maligned recent reboot of The Running Man will know what I mean. It was packed with knowing references and easter eggs for movie geeks, plus, as with all of his films, a soundtrack full of outstanding tunes, some of which you know and others you’ll be hearing for the first time.
Thus, it’s slightly frustrating that he’s never yet sat in the important chair on a movie that pretty much everyone would end up seeing, which these days usually means a Marvel film. Not that he hasn’t come close; in fact, he and his writer friend Joe Cornish were, for some time, supposed to put together 2015’s Ant-Man starring Paul Rudd, but due to creative differences, he departed from the movie before production began.
It left something of a bitter taste for Wright, who outright refused to watch it once it had been released, later telling Uproxx, “I haven’t seen it, and I haven’t even seen the trailer. It would kind of be like asking me, ‘Do you want to watch your ex-girlfriend have sex?’ Like, ‘No, I’m good’.”
Despite being pretty miffed that he wasn’t able to direct the film, which went on to make more than half a billion dollars at the box office, and despite the eventual director using the screenplay that Wright and Cornish wrote over an eight-year span, he refuses to say anything bad about it, but won’t even watch a snippet, adding, “The closest I came to [watching Ant-Man] was that somebody sitting near me on a flight was watching it. And when I saw that the person sitting next to me was going to watch the movie, I thought, ‘Hmm, maybe I’m going to do some work on my laptop’.”
Not that the disappointment held him back for long, for he quickly moved on to making Baby Driver, the foot-to-the-floor heist movie that ticked every box on the ‘what makes an Edgar Wright movie so good’ list and made $227million at the box office against a budget of just $34m. Ironically, much of its success was due to moviegoers being tired of big-budget franchises and simply wanting something new and interesting.
Wright doesn’t work on a lot of films, preferring to put his time and effort into finding the right project, which is why, somewhat frustratingly, we have only had two movies from him in the last eight years: The Running Man and the twisty ’60s horror Last Night in Soho.
But it seems fans of his work with Nick Frost and Simon Pegg on the Cornetto Trilogy may well have something to look forward to soon, with all parties committing to making another film as soon as Pegg and Frost, the latter of whom is starring in the new Harry Potter TV series, become available.
Wright has also long been attached to direct the film adaptation of the hit kidnapping novel The Chain, plus we may still get a Baby Driver 2, having recently spoken about the fact that a script for the sequel was already written, but that there were several external factors getting in the way of beginning production.
