Grantland has an interesting perspective on the Wright/Marvel debacle:
Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
When Wright signed on, Iron Man was still two years down the road and Marvel was an upstart studio looking to build buzz with help from cool directors. In 2014, it’s a Disney subsidiary with a slate of interlocking super-tentpole movies whiteboarded up through 2021, by which time all our moviegoing decisions will be determined by the iron will of Ultron anyway. In a plan that complex, there can’t be much room for the potentially boat-rocking visions of auteurs, no matter how much fan loyalty they command. The analogy you hear most often is that the MCU films have become like a giant TV series with Feige in the showrunner’s chair, and that writers and directors who participate in the process are required to deliver a brick that fits in the wall. Consistency matters. And these movies are all so intertwined from a business/perception perspective that Marvel can no longer afford to roll the dice on a hip, genre-subverting superhero film that might not do Winter Soldier numbers on its opening weekend. Letting Wright walk away makes Marvel look bad to film-geek Twitter, but if the box-office headline after Ant-Man opened were anything but ANT-MAN SQUASHES COMPETITION, it would call into question the viability of the whole Movieverse.
Yeah, that sounds about right to me.
