Among the ever-expanding world of Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, the most anticipated project for my money was Edgar Wright’s Ant-man. It had the components to be something special in the genre: a weird superhero, played by Paul Rudd, written and directed by the guy who made Scott Pilgrim and Shaun of the Dead. Given these pieces, there seemed little chance Ant-man would be just another medium-level superhero blockbuster of the kind Matt Zoller Seitz recently lamented. Not with that pedigree.

Well, it turns out we’ll never know. Last week it was announced that Marvel Studios and Edgar Wright had parted ways on Ant-man. This is bummer news.

Today, The Hollywood Reporter followed up on this split. According to THR, Marvel Studios and its president Kevin Feige were uncomfortable with Wright’s take on the script.

Sources say Marvel had been unhappy with his take on Ant-Man for weeks. Originally set to begin shooting June 2, the production had been put on hiatus while Feige ordered revisions of the script that was co-written by Wright and Joe Cornish. According to sources, Wright had been willing to make revisions earlier in the process. But the new rewrites took place without Wright’s input, and when he received Marvel’s new version early during the week of May 19, he walked, prompting a joint statement announcing his exit “due to differences in their visions of the film.”

Of course this kind of creative control split isn’t unusual, but it’s worth taking a second to recognize just how committed Marvel Studios appears to be their formula. One would think Feige and Marvel knew what they were getting with Wright. If Wright and Ant-man were split at this point in the game (Wright’s been working on Ant-man for a decade or so), then can any challenge to the Kevin Feige vision of the MCU stand a chance of being made?

Only time will tell. But according to the anonymous sources (yeah, I know) at THR, Feige’s already worried about Marvel getting away from their bread and butter interchangeable scripts. “Insiders say Marvel feels it already might have gone outside its comfort zone with August’s Guardians of the Galaxy,” the same THR reports claims.

The reason this matters is that Marvel is the current heavy-weight champion of the sci-fi, superhero, comic-book adaptation universe. And for the genre, Marvel does consistently the best work. I’m a fan of several of their films. But the cruddy Marvel films are box-office hits, and the more momentum Marvel Studios builds, the more hesitant Kevin Feige appears to be to use that weight to make better, or at least different, movies.

There used to be a model in Hollywood that allowed the successful blockbusters of the summer to finance creative, dynamic films that might not otherwise get made. Marvel has those resources, and they’re making, on average, decent movies. But think of the creative, interesting projects you could make in the Marvel universe with some of that money and a different range and scale and vision of projects? Not every Marvel Studios picture needs a $150 Million budget; some would do well with less money, frankly. Not to mention, unique story-tellers like Edgar Wright want to come and make superhero movies with you. Don’t waste that opportunity by committing only to repetition of story and budget and scale, while driving away any chance to inject some originality.

Eventually, mediocrity will lose its appeal.

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