When news broke that Marvel Studios was making an Ant-Man movie with director Edgar Wright, it inspired a certain amount of head-scratching and even outright derision about the cinematic prospects of “a silly, boring character” who seemed far removed from the front ranks of Marvel Comics superheroes. In an interview with MTV, Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige confirms that the appeal has less to do with the character and more to do with the chance to work with Wright. “It’s certainly set in the Marvel Universe,” says Feige of the still-developing Ant-Man film due in 2015, “but it’s also through the lens of Edgar Wright—which is the only reason we’re making the movie.” And so, Ant-Man is the first film unofficially announced as part of “Phase Three”—Marvel’s next step after the sequel-heavy, Guardians Of The Galaxy-introducing Phase Two—which Feig says will center on increasingly more obscure characters from “a different corner [of the Marvel Universe] than we’ve seen before.”
Likely among them: a movie for Doctor Strange, the mystical magician whose original adventures, illustrated by Steve Ditko, epitomized mainstream psychedelia in ‘60s superhero comics. After years of false starts, Feige says Strange is “definitely” one of the characters he’s hoping to develop, saying, He checks the box off this criteria that I have… He’s totally different from anything we’ve done before.” The last reported Doctor Strange script was, disappointingly, in the hands of Thomas Dean Donnelly and Joshua Oppenheimer, whose credits include the infamous Ray Bradbury adaptation A Sound Of Thunder and that instantly forgotten reboot of Conan The Barbarian. But then, Nicolas Cage has been known to get out of bed and grow out his Fu Manchu mustache for less.