Ant-Man has been a hot topic on the site as of late. More so than Dr. Strange finding a director or even Marvel’s shortlist of possible actors to play the character. With so much negative press fueling the Ant-Man press machine, one would have hoped that settling on Peyton Reed as director with Adam McKay doing the rewrites would have cleared the air. But this latest update just adds more fuel to the fire.

One of the reasons why original director Edgar Wright left in the first place was because he did not like how Marvel’s in-house writers homogenized his script. After his departure, Marvel was left scrambling to find a replacement in hopes of meeting the scheduled start date. From there we all know the story. But according to a new rumor, product placement was another reason why Wright had an ugly divorce with the studio. Hit the jump for more.

The rumor comes from Film Drunk by way of Brendon, formerly of the gossip formerly of WWTDD. A story like this makes little sense, considering how Marvel Studios’ films practically sell themselves. Yes, there are product placement in their films, but I am more focused on the heroes and villains than I am about buying a soda or a new insurance policy. But, as rumor has it, Disney was so concerned about having product placement in Ant-Man that, as a result, Wright left because he had no control over these ads.

As confusing as that may sound, the people over at AICN provided a bit more insight on the matter at hand.

This reasoning seems to make more sense considering the source material at hand. Ant-Man doesn’t have as big of a fanbase as Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, or Hulk. So the thought of adding product placement to help make the character more relatable to the audience makes more sense, especially since this is a story about Scott Lang, a thief. Then there is the fact that Ant-Man’s powers change his size from small to large. There’s also plenty of money to be made in product placement. There really isn’t much more to it than that.

Unfortunately that also means, whatever Wright and co-writer Joe Cornish had in store for us has been thrown away, which is quite sad really considering the two have been working on the script for eight years. Hopefully that script comes into the light eventually, because I would like to see the difference between Wright and Cornish’s original script and the changes that Marvel/Disney requested.

Ant-Man also stars Evangeline Lilly, Corey Stoll, Michael Douglas, Michael Pena, and Patrick Wilson. The film opens in theaters on July 17, 2014

[Source: WWTDD via FilmDrunk | AICN]