What went wrong with Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania? That’s the question Marvel fans are asking right now in the wake of the latest MCU movie opening to frankly pretty awful reviews. The first two Paul Rudd vehicles were charmingly low-key (for Marvel) affairs, but the threequel, unfortunately, swaps that small-scale appeal for an awkward attempt at franchise furniture-moving. The real reason it’s flopped, though, might be because it’s fallen prey to Hollywood’s most specific curse.
As Twitter user @hueb_marcelo hilariously realized in a mind-blowing tweet, Quantumania is the latest example of a 2020s movie trilogy concluding with its least popular entry. First, there was Jurassic World: Dominion and then Halloween Kills and now Ant-Man 3. But what do these three films have in common? They’ve all dumped Judy Greer from their casts, and have proven to pay the ultimate price for doing so. Like the OP says, “do Judy Greer wrong and you WILL get cursed.”
To further add to the irony, Greer’s roles in all three franchises — despite hailing from wildly different genres — are pretty much identical. In each one, the actress plays the largely sidelined mother of the films’ main child or adolescent characters… before the series lose interest in her and unceremoniously removes her from the equation in later installments.
Clearly, Greer has made some kind of dark pact with the movie gods to ensure any who wrong her are punished. Maybe to appease these cinephile Cthulu-like entities, Hollywood execs will have to start casting Greer in everything, which honestly we’d be perfectly OK with. Get ready for Kevin Feige to announce a Maggie Lang vs. Kang Disney Plus series any day now.
You can see the Judy Greer-less Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania in cinemas now.