All film's go through changes and Marvel's ANT-MAN was no exception; director Peyton Reed spoke with Cinemablend and revealed that the film originally began with an action-packed standalone sequence much like the traditional openings you'd find in a James Bond film. There will be some minor spoilers from here on out for those of you who haven't seen ANT-MAN yet, so…take heed.
ANT-MAN as it exists now opens in 1989 with Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) resigning from S.H.I.E.L.D, but it was originally intended to be a much different sequence:
It was basically a standalone sequence where you really did not see it was Hank Pym. He was retrieving some microfilm from this, originally Cuban general and then it because a Panamanian general… It really was designed in those early drafts to be almost like a Bond movie standalone scene in the beginning. It was going to show the powers. You never saw Ant-Man, it almost felt like an Invisible Man sequence, and it’s really, really cool.
The scene certainly sounds "really, really cool" but Reed soon realized that the sequence was "tonally disconnected from the movie we were making." However the scene wasn't scrapped in the script stage, Peyton Reed actually shot and cut the sequence before scrapping it in the editing stage.
We actually ended up shooting that sequence and cut it together and it’s fantastic, but the more we got into editing, it just felt too disconnected to the rest of the movie. It felt like vestige of those earlier drafts, which as a standalone thing was really cool. We actually talked at one point about releasing like a standalone, Hank Pym as Ant-Man. Who knows if that will still happen.
It sounds like we still may see that sequence in some form or another, be it as a Blu-ray extra, a Marvel One-Shot, or as a part of ANT-MAN 2; after all, more Michael Douglas as Hank Pym can't be a bad thing.