“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” introduced Jonathan Majors into the Marvel Cinematic Universe as Kang the Conquerer, the franchise’s new Thanos-sized villain. While the actor received glowing reviews for his quietly menacing Kang, “Quantumania” itself was widely panned. The film is one of the worst-reviewed Marvel films in history with a 48% on Rotten Tomatoes, which nearly matches the record-low “Eternals” score of 47%. The film’s Metacritic score also stands at a paltry 48. Majors joined IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast this week and confronted “Quantumania’s” low critic scores.
“It doesn’t change how I see myself, period. It’s all data,” Majors said about bad reviews. “I’m a performance within a story. One thing I will say to my team as we’re leaving a premiere if they’re reading reviews, I’ll say, ‘How’s the movie doing?’ I try to clean my plate and take care of my part. The response is: ‘You’re straight. You’re good. They like you.’ And they tell me about the movie. Sometimes the movie is also on that level, and sometimes [it’s not].”
“It’s just people,” Majors added about film critics. “They have an opinion. You always have an opinion. I’m no fool. I know these are people writing it. These aren’t my Yale professors or my drama teachers. These are people who have kids and they have a perspective, they have a religious upbringing or a lack thereof. They live in this town, or they want to be seen in this way or don’t want to be seen in this way. I look at the aggregate and, ok, 47. But what does that 47 mean when you also got this amount of box office? What do these things mean? It’s information. I am in the know. I won’t play myself. If you are a critic on a level, I probably know you and understand your politics.”
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” screenwriter Jeff Loveness told The Daily Beast after the film opened that critics hating the movie took him by surprise, adding, “I was in a pretty low spot… Those were not good reviews, and I was like, ‘What the …?’”
“I’m really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan [Majors] and Michelle Pfeiffer [scientist Janet Pym],” Loveness said. “I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it.”
Loveness got in better spirits after he decided to attend a public screening of “Quantumania” and got to hear audience members laughing at his jokes. He said, “I’m like, ‘Goddamn! No, [the reviews] are wrong! I’m right! MODOK is great!’ I’m pretty happy with it overall, and I think I learned how to take a punch this week. And now that I learned that it’s not too bad, I can just get on with making things.”
Majors’ MCU arc will continue through “Loki” Season 2 and more until it crescendos with 2025’s “Avenger: The Kang Dynasty.”
