Marvel's Ant-Man got a rough start: After years of development (and even a finished test reel) from the brilliant Edgar Wright, Marvel abruptly switched gears on the film, parting ways with Wright and rushing into production with the cast Wright had assembled, but a new script by Adam McKay (Anchorman, The Other Guys) and star Paul Rudd, with Peyton Reed (Bring It On, The Break-Up) directing. Under normal circumstances, a goofy, comic-book action movie from McKay and Reed would be promising—but under these circumstances, it's almost impossible not to look at the film and wonder what might have been under Wright, one of our greatest (and greatest comedy) directors.

Ant-Man might end up being great—Marvel has yet to have a serious miss yet, with the best of its films, like last year's Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Guardians of the Galaxy, being damn near euphoric, and even their stumbles, like Iron Man 2, still providing a pretty fun night out at the movies. But the loss of Wright, for film nerds at least, still hangs over the film. On one hand, it's like if The Hobbit movies had been, as originally intended, directed by Guillermo del Toro: some alternate reality has those movies, and I want to see those, not the awful ones we got. On the other hand, these kind of switch-ups happen all the goddamn time in Hollywood, and more than a few fantastic movies have emerged from situations far more tumultuous than Ant-Man's. As someone who'd like nothing more than for Paul Rudd to be a huge star in a franchise where he regularly shrinks down and rides ants, I'm trying to keep my mind open, and not watch the above Edgar Wright video too many times.

All the same, Ant-Man's trailer feels generic and bland—a too-long set-up for one joke, and a trailer that relies on so many origin story tropes that the end result feels less like the fun, offbeat charm of Guardians (which seems like the direction a movie called Ant-Man should be heading in) and more like rote, big-budget superheroics. It's not a bad trailer, but it sure isn't a good one.

Via the A.V. Club, though, comes something better: Peter Wilson's mashup of the Ant-Man trailer and Beyond the Candelabra, Steven Soderbergh's HBO movie about Liberace (Michael Douglas), who (just as Douglas' character apparently does in Ant-Man) takes a young man named Scott under his wing. The result is something weird and funny and creepy and interesting—it might be a trailer for a movie that doesn't exist, but right now at least, I want to see this non-existent Ant-Man more than the actual Ant-Man.