In a surprise announcement on Saturday in San Diego Comic-Con’s Hall H, Legendary Pictures revealed their plans for a new King Kong film called Skull Island and showed the crowd a sneak peek video.

Now, Deadline reports that the studio has offered the directing job to Joe Cornish, who made his feature directorial debut with 2011’s well-received Attack the Block. No word yet on whether Cornish will accept the gig, which is said to be an origin story/prequel tale set on the behemoth ape’s island home, Skull Island. The filmmaker has reportedly been getting quite a bit of offers for big films, such as Universal’s Section Six, the James Bond-esque action-spy film written by Aaron Berg.

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.

Marvel Studios has officially announced that Peyton Reed will replaced Edgar Wright as the director of their Phase Three kick-off superhero feature Ant-Man. Adam McKay, the director of the Anchorman movies and Step Brothers, is also coming aboard to rewrite the screenplay previously in the hands of Wright and Joe Cornish.

Reed’s past credits as a director include Bring It On, Down With Love, The Break-Up, and Yes Man. He’s accustomed to making entertaining comedies for major studios that are both visually and verbally inventive, so hopefully he will prove to be a worthy successor to the departing Wright. His hiring brings to an end a brief but exhaustive search for a viable replacement director that has sucked in and spit out names such as Ruben Fleischer, David Wain, Rawson Michael Thurber, Michael Dowse, and Nicholas Stoller. McKay himself was also mentioned as a possible pinch-hitter for Wright but bowed out close to signing a deal due to other directorial commitments.

Last Friday, Edgar Wright, the globally adored filmmaker behind the Three Flavours Cornetto trilogy and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World, abruptly departed the production of Ant-Man, the movie intended to be the kick-off to Marvel Studios’ Phase Three slate. During the weekend that followed, details over Wright’s surprising surrender of his directing duties emerged that suggested Marvel had taken the script out of his and co-writer Joe Cornish‘s hands and reportedly assigned it to Eric Pearson, writer of the Marvel One-Shot short films.

Unable to make a film that would have satisfied both the desires of Marvel and Disney and his own creative instincts, Wright decided to take a hike from the project he had been attached to on-and-off for the better part of the past eight years. Marvel already has his replacement cuing up in the bullpen as I write this, or so they claim. Meanwhile, Wright’s filmmaking colleagues/Marvel employees Joss Whedon and James Gunn have both expressed their sympathy and solidarity with his plight, but the man himself has remained silent on the issue until recently.

This week started out pretty good for Marvel Studios with the extremely positive response received by the latest trailer for their big summer flick Guardians of the Galaxy that was released on Monday. Now that it’s Friday, we’re getting one of the worse pieces of Marvel-related news imaginable.

Action-comedy filmmaker extraordinaire Edgar Wright has departed Marvel’s upcoming Phase Three kick-off film Ant-Man as director. Wright has been attached to directing the film long before the studio became a force to be reckoned with in Hollywood. But just as principal photography was gearing up to begin, the universally adored British director behind such classics as Shaun of the Dead and Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World decided to split with Marvel “due to differences in their vision of the film,” or so a joint statement issued by Wright and the studio claimed.