For years, Marvel Studios and Edgar Wright seemed to be mutually excited about working together on an Ant-Man movie. However, “creative differences” reportedly led to Wright’s departure, while Peyton Reed stepped in to helm Ant-Man and its upcoming sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp. Wright has largely remained silent about the specific reason behind his departure, until he broke his silence this week.

While promoting his new movie, Baby Driver, on Variety’s Playback podcast, Wright said “I think the most diplomatic answer is I wanted to make a Marvel movie but I don’t think they really wanted to make an Edgar Wright movie. It was a really heartbreaking decision to have to walk away after having worked on it for so long, because me and Joe Cornish in some form—it’s funny some people say, ‘Oh they’ve been working on it for eight years’ and that was somewhat true, but in that time I had made three movies so it wasn’t like I was working on it full time. But after The World’s End I did work on it for like a year, I was gonna make the movie.”

According to Wright, the schism was born out of Marvel’s desire to create new draft of the movie without Wright and Cornish. “Suddenly becoming a director for hire on it, you’re sort of less emotionally invested and you start to wonder why you’re there, really.”

While Wright and Cornish retained a credit on the final film, it’s unclear how much of their script remained in the final cut. Although we enjoyed the movie that was ultimately released, we would have very much liked to have seen Wright’s version of Ant-Man. However, Wright’s departure from Ant-Man did have an upside for the director. as it led to his passion project, Baby Driver.

“The good thing that came out of it is, I got to kind of move on to [Baby Driver], which was a script that I had already written…And the other important thing for me is almost the entirety of my crew who were gonna do that movie sort of left in solidarity. So it was really important to me to get another film going so I could kind of re-employ them all.”

How do you feel about Wright’s departure from Ant-Man? Let us know in the comment section below!

Images: Marvel Studios