Peyton Reed's 'doubly excited' for 'Ant-Man' sequel

Brian Truitt | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Exclusive clip: Behind the scenes of Falcon's cameo in 'Ant-Man' Anthony Mackie discusses his appearance as the winged Avenger named Falcon in this exclusive behind-the-scenes clip from "Ant-Man."

Ant-Man has turned into the little movie that could.

Starring Paul Rudd as shrinking superhero Scott Lang, the Marvel Studios film opened with a $57.2 million debut weekend — pretty good for the cinematic solo debut of a guy not as widely known as Iron Man or Captain America. But it's been a box-office force ever since, finally opening big in China late last month and now holding a worldwide haul of more than $517 million — bigger than both Cap and Thor's first films.

"Obviously I didn’t want to be the first Marvel movie that tanked, but it was nice," says Ant-Man director Peyton Reed. "I feel like audiences responded to what we were trying to do, which was to do a little bit more of an intimate superhero movie about fathers and daughters."

There's a lot more Ant-Man to come, too. In addition to the movie's release on digital HD platforms and the Disney Movies Anywhere app Nov. 17 and Blu-ray/DVD Dec. 8, Rudd has a supporting role in the next Marvel project Captain America: Civil War (in theaters May 6) and the sequel Ant-Man and the Wasp already has a release date of July 6, 2018. The follow-up would assumably get the band back together with Reed (who's still officially in talks to return), Rudd, Michael Douglas as Scott's mentor/original Ant-Man Hank Pym, and Evangeline Lilly as Hank's daughter Hope van Dyne, who was shown her new Wasp costume during the end-credits scene of Ant-Man.

Reed talks with USA TODAY about what fans can look forward to with the in-home release, Ant-Man's meeting with an Avenger and what he has in store for the sequel. (WARNING: Minor spoilers ahead.)

You have a series of deleted and extended scenes on the upcoming digital/Blu-ray release. Were there any that you particularly hated to lose?

There’s a lot of experimentation that goes on in the cutting room on a movie like this, and one of the things that I said from the beginning was I wanted an Ant-Man that’s under two hours. I wanted it to be really tight. One, because it's a comedy and two, because it’s essentially a heist movie and it had to really move.

There’s one extended sequence where Scott Lang is pretending to be a cable repair guy and he comes into Hank Pym’s house. It was originally him casing the house before they went in there (to steal the Ant-Man suit) and got into the safe. It was a fun thing because there was a little cat-and-mouse going on with each guy sizing the other one up and it was really fun as a scene. But it started to be a pace killer and we decided there was a much more efficient and fun way for those characters to meet for the first time.

You have both an Antony — as in Ant-Man’s loyal insect friend — and an Anthony — as in Mackie who plays the winged Avenger Falcon — in the film.

Bringing Falcon into the movie really was when Paul Rudd and Adam McKay were starting the rewrites and we were talking about elements that we wanted to add. We were doing a heist movie and one of the tropes is that trial by fire where everything is organized with the heist but, oh, there’s this one piece of technology we don’t have and we have to send our hero into this situation to get it and he might not be fully prepared. It made sense to pit Scott Lang against something or somebody before he was really ready.

We talked a lot about who it could be and Falcon just felt like the right thing. We all loved Anthony Mackie in (the Captain America sequel) Winter Soldier, and we all loved the idea of Mackie and Rudd squaring off. What would the combination of their two powers be like? It started to feel organic to our movie. Marvel never ever came and said, "You’ve gotta work Thor into the movie!" There was none of that stuff. We came to them saying, "This feels like it could be very very cool." And as a kid who grew up reading those comic books, that's the stuff I love.

Also, Anthony Mackie is very funny in our movie, and I like the idea that Scott Lang is tasked with getting this piece of equipment, he’s got to come up against the Falcon but he’s also a fanboy so he’s kind of apologizing when he’s fighting him.

In terms of Antony, the ants were an ever-evolving thing in the move. In any Ant-Man comic, the ants are really important and it was a huge challenge to visualize the ants and make them all very dictinct. As we were working on the script, we really liked the idea of focusing on one specific ant that maybe Pym had just sort of numbered and was just like all the other ants but that Scott had a Lone Ranger/Trigger relationship with, like it was his trusty steed.

And then the further we got into it, the more we liked the idea of this sacrifice – could we get an emotional reaction from an audience in a movie called Ant-Man from an ant dying? It started to intrigue us. Everybody steps on ants everyday, but this really appealed to us, me particularly, and we were really able to pull it off. It’s a weird little tragic moment.

There’s a couple of moms who have written and said, "My son is distraught about Antony dying. Can you please just tell me, did he really die?" And I could have said, "Well, he did die. Maybe now’s a good time to explain to your child that sometimes there are casualties. "But what I actually said was the average lifespan of an ant is something like 12 weeks, so he was probably going to die pretty soon anyway.

Was it in your wildest imagination while filming that there might be a sequel, or were you not even going there?

Both actually. It was in my wildest imagination but you can’t ever do a movie going into it thinking, "Oh, we’re going to have two or three more of these movies to finish telling the story!" This movie had to have a beginning, middle and end, and with or without the costume, Ant-Man is also very much Hope van Dyne’s origin story because she has to learn to make peace with her father and she’s an incredibly powerful character in that movie – way more qualified than even Scott Lang is to take that job.

We knew it would be incredibly satisfying to introduce her getting the costume because she so deserves it. Part of the arc between Hank Pym and Hope van Dyne is Hank realizing, I’ve got this incredibly capable person right here and I’m finally realizing what I thought was protecting her has really been holding her back. And he rewards her with this suit. It felt satisfying in the moment but of course everybody wants to see Evangeline in the outfit — me being one of them — and a kickass hero.

Trailer premiere: 'Ant-Man' Blu-ray An exclusive trailer for the in-home release of the superhero film "Ant-Man."

Was “It’s about damn time” always her last line in the end-credits scene or did you consider others?

It was always the last line in that scene, yeah. We had some slightly different positioning for that scene at one point in the edit, but it said it all, about her character and about the larger context of female heroes.

Are you starting work on the sequel soon?

There are a couple of things I'm developing before then. I doubt I will shoot a movie before we start developing the sequel, but I think in the next month or two we’ll start hashing out the outline for Ant-Man and the Wasp, which is really, really exciting.

You were excited to sign on to do the first one back at 2014's Comic-Con. Are you just bonkers to get to do another one?

I’m doubly excited. We’re going to do some very, very different things in the next movie and we’ve set up stuff in the first movie that we can have a lot of fun with in the second movie and go both bigger and smaller at the same time.

I’m sure people want to see Giant-Man run across the screen at some point. Maybe just show his feet.

(Laughs) That’s the thing about Hank Pym and Scott Lang in the comics. There’s so much stuff — there’s like 50 years of source material to choose from, so we’re being smart about what we’re going to do with the movie. But there’s some very weird stuff in store for these characters.