Entertainment Weekly’s ‘Ant-Man’ set visit reveals plot details, script changes, and more

Michael Douglas has a question. “Who,” he asks, “do I have to f- - - to get out of this room?” It’s day 25 of the shoot for Marvel’s new superhero movie Ant-Man at Pinewood Atlanta Studios. Paul Rudd stars as former jailbird Scott Lang, who can shrink to microscopic size thanks to a special suit, as well as communicate with his namesake insects courtesy of his helmet. Douglas plays inventor Hank Pym, creator of the aforementioned outerwear, and ­Evangeline Lilly is Pym’s daughter, Hope Van Dyne. Today this trio are shooting a scene in Pym’s basement control room in which they hatch a plan to steal an even more advanced “Yellowjacket” suit from the villainous Darren Cross (The Strain’s Corey Stoll).

The sequence is filled with the kind of exposition-heavy dialogue (“Cross has the place loaded with transmission blockers!”) that starts to sound like gibberish upon repetition. The problem? There is a lot of repetition as director Peyton Reed (The Break-Up) requests take after take, either to resolve technical glitches, to alter dialogue, or because an actor flubs a line. (At one point, ­Douglas refers to “Howard Stern,” the father of shock radio, when he’s meant to say “Howard Stark,” the father of Iron Man Tony.) By the time Douglas raises his F-bomb query, even if he’s (kind of) kidding, it’s fair to say he’s speaking for everyone on set.