Kevin Feige Says ANT-MAN Could Be The "Antidote" To AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON

Last week, I visited the Walt Disney Studios lot in Burbank to attend the press junket for Marvel's newest film, Ant-Man. I've already written about a couple worthwhile statements that were made during (and after) the press conference, but there was one thing in particular that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige said that I thought was worth highlighting.

At the junket, he spoke about the concept of acknowledging the admittedly ridiculous premise of this superhero, as well as talking about how the movie contrasts with Joss Whedon's Avengers: Age of Ultron, which debuted earlier this summer:

I don’t think we set out and said, ‘This will be our funniest movie,’ or ‘This is a comedy.’ I don’t look at any of our films as necessarily one thing, but humor, as we always say, is a huge element. When you’re dealing with a concept — people riding ants, people communicating [with] ants, calling ants 'Antony' — you have to acknowledge to the audience that we know this is funny to a certain extent. And even when we cast Paul, people thought, ‘Is it a comedy because you cast a comedian?’ We cast the guy we thought could be a kick-ass superhero who happens to be funny.

In terms of coming off of Ultron, when we put these two films together in this year, it was always knowing that one could be the antidote to the other. That coming off of Ultron, being as sort of gargantuan an exercise as it was, that’d it be fun to do something yes, that was funny, but also dealt on a very different scale. Had the same kind of, hopefully, thrills and action elements, but in a very different way. So it’s a flying country in one film, and it’s a little girl’s bedroom in another film.

He's absolutely right. The stakes in Ant-Man are much, much smaller than they were in Ultron, and I think a lot of audiences are going to find that to be one of the movie's most satisfying elements when seemingly every other huge blockbuster — including Whedon's film — puts the lives of everyone in the world (or at least in one major city) at risk. I think the Avengers sequel was left with basically no other choice than to operate on a huge scale because the threat has to be enough to cause the Avengers to band together to take it down, and Ultron definitely fit that description. But there's something to be said for the smaller, more self-contained action found in Ant-Man, too.

Ant-Man hits theaters on July 17th.