Jonathan Majors brushes off scathing ‘Quantumania’ reviews as nothing but ‘data’

Not much managed to escape from the wreckage of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania unscathed, but Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang the Conqueror was at least one of them.

Sure, the screenplay may have instantly watered down the threat of the Multiverse Saga’s big bad after he was thwarted at the very first hurdle, but the bizarre mid-credits scene did at least give audience a taste of what’s to come from the rising star as we continue on the road towards the Avengers double-header of The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars.

It was a strong turn lost in a sea of needless exposition and murky visuals, never mind the fact Kang accomplished absolutely nothing by the time the credits came up after every major character ended the film in exactly the same place they started it, but the actor admitted in an interview with IndieWire that he’s not going to get caught up in a critical trashing.

“It doesn’t change how I see myself, period. It’s all data. 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. 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, okay, 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.”

On the plus side, we’ll be seeing a lot more of Majors in plenty of MCU projects to come, so even if he’s managed to avoid the wrath of the Quantumania criticism so far, there’s no shortage of time and opportunity for the star to continue establishing Kang as a threat more formidable than Thanos.