Peyton is someone that I've been a fan of for a long time. People may not remember, though probably your readers remember, that he was attached to Fantastic Four more than 10 years ago. We spent a lot of time together… and I got along with Peyton very, very well and he had awesome ideas and an awesome vision for the movie, and for various reasons he ended up leaving that movie...

He's come in to meet on a lot of our movies over the years, in particular Guardians. He had a lot of awesome things to say on Guardians. But James [Gunn] had a slightly more solid take that was of interest to us. But Peyton was always on our lists, and so when this happened and Edgar [Wright] said 'Not for me' we met with a handful of people, but Peyton was always one that I thought would be great.

It was not a slam-dunk that he would just step into it and do it. He wanted to be sure that he was wasn't just inheriting something or following someone else's lead. Or wasn't inheriting something that the evil studio had watered down to be something bad. I kept saying, 'You can either read what's online, or come in and talk to us and look at all this stuff.' He looked at everything, he talked with us, and he said 'Number one, I agree with the direction you're going in. And number two, I can add to it.' And he has – the movie is in as good a shape as it's ever been right now.

It's still very much in the spirit of what Edgar's original pitch was and the entire template of the movie is what Edgar set out and originally came and pitched us maybe eight years ago now. But it's on its way to being the absolute best version of what that movie could have been.

"I don't know if we ever thought of ourselves as invincible, quite the opposite. If you start thinking you're invincible you start making bad decisions. We think we're very vincible, and worry all the time! No, it's much more personal than that.

We've been with Edgar for eight years, we saw the premiere of a number of his films in this very theatre. The biggest disappointment to me is not that he will not be making the movie. It was determined by him and by us that that would not be the best thing for the movie. The disappointing thing for me is not being able to make a movie with him, right now; it's just the personal relationship. And it was amicable and we sat in a room together and said this isn't working. I just wish I or he had figured that out somewhere in the eight years leading up to it.

But we said, OK, let's put out a statement and let people know it's not screaming and fighting and dramatic. It just came to came down to creative differences. And I said, 'Well, nobody's ever gonna believe that because that's what everybody always says.' And Edgar said 'But that is what it is.' He was nervous about what the perception would be, and I said to Edgar 'Don't worry about it, because the perception will be that the evil studio squashes the innocent filmmaker'. That will be the perception no matter what, and that is the perception, but it's much more complicated than that.

Again to me, it's reading in the early days of online fandom with Ain't It Cool News back in 1999 that Bryan Singer was a terrible choice for X-Men and Hugh Jackman is way too tall to be Wolverine. We're very thick-skinned and we're use to the second-guessing and the color commentary during the process. We've done what we've always done, which is block it out and make the best movie possible because it always comes down to the end product, when the lights go down on opening night and the clean slate appears and what is the experience of the movie. And clearly we believe that we're on the road now with Peyton Reed to the best version of Ant-Man that could have existed."

"Well, it's not worth, right now, going into that in super-specifics. I wish it wasn't as late in the day as it was, but it just had become clear that there was an impasse that we had never reached before. We've worked with lots of unbelievable talented filmmakers like Edgar before, and of course there are disagreements along the way. There's always been disagreements, whether big or small; that's the collaborative nature of filmmaking and in particular the collaborative nature at Marvel that has producers, not just me, that are very involved and very opinionated. We had always found a way around it, a way to battle through it and emerge on the other side with a better product. At no point do we hire filmmakers who do everything we say, and at no point do we hire filmmakers that we let just do anything they want. There is always a middle ground that we find, and it just became clear that both of us was just being too polite over the past eight years I guess! Then it was clear that, 'Oh you're really not gonna stop talking about that note?' 'Oh, you're really not gonna do that note?' Alright this isn't working."

EXCLUSIVE: Don’t expect Patrick Wilson, Matt Gerard and Kevin Weisman to be at tomorrow’s Marvel Studios Hall H presentation at Comic-Con. That trio has dropped out of the ever morphing Ant-Man movie that has Paul Rudd and Michael Douglas and The Hobbit‘s Evangeline Lilly starring. The movie has been in some state of flux after director Edgar Wright dropped out over differences in creative vision with Marvel’s Kevin Feige, so not surprisingly there is speculation that the trio’s exit is for the same reason that Wright departed and was replaced by Peyton Reed. Marvel insiders adamantly dispute that.

We’re told by insiders that Gerard and Weisman’s characters were omitted in the newly evolved version of the script. Wilson, on the other hand, had a scheduling conflict as production on the movie got delayed, and that is why he won’t be there. Lilly is at Comic-Con to tour a childrens book and Peter Jackson’s final Hobbit installment, The Battle Of The Five Armies. We wouldn’t be surprised to see her at the Marvel panel along with Rudd, Douglas and Reed. Feige always pulls out the stops on Comic-Con, so we expect star-studded updates on Avengers: Age Of Ultron and some vamping on the imminent release Guardians Of The Galaxy. Feige is always good for a few surprises though it seems doubtful he’ll be able to bring in Joaquin Phoenix, who’ll star in Marvel’s Doctor Strange film.