Now that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has come and gone from theaters and is streaming on Disney Plus, we can all take a step back and officially name it as one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s worst-ever movies by any conceivable metrics.
Rotten Tomatoes approval rating? Joint bottom of the pile out of 33 feature films to date. Audience score? Also joint bottom on CinemaScore. Box office? The lowest-grossing Ant-Man movie, one of the worst-performing entries in the MCU since the end of Phase One, and the franchise’s single lowest-earning sequel of all-time. Those are facts, people, and they can’t be denied.
There’s also the looming shadow of Jonathan Majors, which has cast a dark cloud over anything and everything related to Quantumania. Marvel is doing its best to pretend he doesn’t exist by omitting the controversial star from any marketing materials and the official Disney Plus synopsis, but that’s only making people feel more conflicted now they’ve had a chance to revisit the film on-demand and come to the conclusion that the Creed III antagonist is carrying the entire thing on his back.
It’s easy to forget – partly because that’s exactly what Disney wants you to do – that Majors was lauded as the saving grace of Peyton Reed’s threequel, and ended up as one of the very few elements to emerge with their reputation unscathed. Of course, that turned around spectacularly when the allegations of assault surfaced, leaving viewers and executives alike in the sticky situation of being forced to admit through gritted teeth that he was the best thing about an otherwise-dismal comic book adaptation, even though the chances grow exceedingly higher that he’ll end up being let go.