‘Quantumania’ going toe-to-toe with ‘Morbius’ and ‘Dark Phoenix’ as Marvel’s worst box office performer says it all

Another massive crack in the impenetrable facade of the Marvel Cinematic Universe appeared when Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania took such an extreme pummeling that it’s ended up as one of the franchise’s worst-rated installments by any measurable metric, but the movie’s rapid downfall at the box office might be even more alarming.

Even though Peyton Reed’s Quantum Realm-set caper is only in its second weekend playing in theaters, the numbers make for damning reading. The 31st chapter in the long-running superhero series has suffered the steepest week-to-week drop in MCU history, as well as snatching the record away from Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice as the most precipitous sophomore plummet for any comic book adaptation to debut to over $100 million domestically.

Just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, Quantumania now finds itself doing battle with a pair of the most widely-reviled Marvel blockbusters ever made, with the free-falling threequel hovering perilously close to the second frame figures accrued by infamous critical and commercial catastrophes Dark Phoenix and Morbius.

The final chapter in Fox’s X-Men saga nosedived by 72.6 percent after already flopping with a $33 million bow in June of 2019, while the long-delayed and relentlessly memed debut of Jared Leto’s Living Vampire cratered by almost 75 percent. According to the latest projections, Quantumania is on course to see its taking fall by at least 70 percent if not more, and being lumped in with such a pair of disastrous duds pretty much says it all about how the ignition point for the MCU’s Phase Five has been received.