As a DC guy, I have to ask, “What’s the reaction I should be having?”
“How come the Atom isn’t getting a movie”?
More serious answer:
So there’s two Ant-Men, Hank Pym and Scott Lang. Hank Pym was the original Ant-Man, and in the comics he was co-founder of the Avengers.
I’m really surprised they cast someone so old (Michael Douglas is 69) as the more senior Ant-Man. I was expecting someone about Robert Downey Jr.'s age (48), since in my head Hank Pym and Tony Stark are about the same age.
I guess they’re going more with Hank Pym as the aging mentor to Scott Lang (played by Paul Rudd, 44). But this makes me wonder, in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, has the senior Ant-Man been running around being a super hero since before Iron Man, the Hulk, etc., and we just haven’t heard about him until now?
If this casting proves anything, it’s that Hank Pym definitely won’t be in the suit.
What a shame.
It’d be a great coup if they cast Catherine Zeta-Jones as Janet Van Dyne / the Wasp.
Then, maybe Philip Seymour Hoffman as Egghead?
Wouldn’t it be better to see a flashback of him smacking the crap out of Glenn Close?
I have a feeling that it’s usually stunt men or CGI anytime we see a masked super hero in costume in a movie. The only time the actor needs to put it on is for close-ups of the character unmasked.
It’s probably for the best. The character still hasn’t recovered from that artist’s error years ago, who turned “Pym gestures over-enthusiastically and accidentally hits his wife” into “Pym backhands his wife off her feet”. Putting Hank Pym in the lead means you’re risking a hundred million dollars on a character best known as a wife beater.
Michael Douglas is almost 70 years old, and he looks old. He does not work as an adventuring age Hank Pym.
I do not know enough about Marvel continuity to have a legitimate idea, but I could accept Pym having a (laboratory curiosity) Shrinkerizer technique for the last twenty years or more, but not having the idea of using it for some masked-hero derring-do until after the event of the Avengers movie.
For Paul Rudd’s character, definitely.
That stain on the character will never be forgotten, and it sucks. Ant-Man is Pym, and to see him reduced to a secondary role is disappointing.
But I do understand where they’re coming from.
Classic. 
I’d be fine with them having the Atom in a movie, provided they skip all the bullshit and just go straight to Identity Crisis.
Don’t forget there are several Marvel cinematic universes that to not interact. X-Men is separate from Fantastic Four is separate from Spidey(s) is separate from Avengers/Iron Man/Hulk/Thor/Capt America. Or at least so far they haven’t interacted.
And in the Avengers universe, there were no superheroes before Iron Man (IIRC from a comment made in the first movie).
I would guess that Pym is an aging scientist that has or has had this process, and it takes Lang to either see the application and use it to make himself a superhero (after watching the Avengers rip apart NYC) or gets accidentally exposed to it.
That’s my guess, anyway.
Captain America was a superhero or the word has no meaning.
One possible way they could go with it is that the process has been around for a while, but is an enormous energy hog. It wasn’t until Tony miniaturized the arc reactor that it became feasible to build a portable version that can be used for super-heroing.
You’d still need to explain how Pym and/or Lang got their hands on an arc reactor, given how closely Tony holds on to that tech, of course.
Given the fact that we’ve got two Ant-Men in this movie, and Pym’s reputation in comics as a wife-beater, what are the odds that Hank Pym ends up being the villain of the movie?
He was the first super hero.
Since by all accounts Ant-Man will be a cheeky movie, I expect a montage wherein we see Pym Ant-Man fighting along side in the famous Marvel battles we’ve already seen, but owing to his size, he was able to turn the tides without being noticed - duking it out with the Abomination from inside his stomach while Hulk fought him, pushing a civilian out of the way of The Destroyer’s blast, etc. This has already been done in the comics, and it would accomplish a hell of a lot towards tying in Ant-Man into the existing on screen battles we’re familiar with.
The only Ant-Man actor for me is Garrett Morris.
The movie is going to be the Scott Lang Ant-man origin for all intents and purposes…which doesn’t require Pym to have been a superhero necessarily–just to have developed the shrinking science.
I like the idea of Hank Pym being an older “mad” scientist type who developed the “pym particles” but due to the danger involved has kept them locked away from everyone, including SHIELD. Lang is blackmailed into trying to steal a sample.
Hell, you could CGI Ant-Man into crucial scenes in lots of movies:
[ul]
[li]Show him landing on an iceberg–with his weight being the tipping point that sends it into the path of the Titanic. [/li][li]Have him sitting on Joe Chill’s neck, harassing him as Joe swats, so that Joe doesn’t go into that Gotham alley until right when the Waynes are emerging. [/li][li]Let him be jumping around from leaf to leaf, tantalizing E.T. into delaying getting back to his spacecraft. [/li][li]Larking about in a cave in the Misty Mountains, he works the Ring loose from the possession of Gollum (who is distracted by the goblin he’s about to devour) and leaves it lying there–just to see what might happen as a result.[/li][/ul]
The possibilities are endless!