Any creative mind in Hollywood has to have a certain degree of confidence in their work regardless of whatever anyone else thinks, but Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania writer Jeff Loveness might be clutching at one too many straws when trying to defend a movie that instantly ranked as one of the MCU’s worst.
Looking at the statistics and facts that put it as the second lowest-rated of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s 31 installments on Rotten Tomatoes, joint-lowest on CinemaScore with a B- average, and the recipient of the franchise’s steepest second weekend box office decline in history, it’s difficult to find many positives.
Admittedly, Loveness did confirm to The Daily Beast that he wasn’t best pleased to discover what the critics were saying, even if it comes with the territory.
“To be honest, those reviews took me by surprise. “I’m really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan [Majors] and Michelle Pfeiffer. I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it.”I was in a pretty low spot… Those were not good reviews, and I was like, ‘What the …?’”
That being said, he did go on to reveal that he secretly caught a screening of Quantumania with an audience, which convinced him that maybe he hadn’t penned one of the MCU’s weakest screenplays after all.
“I’m like, ‘Goddamn! No, [the reviews] are wrong! I’m right! M.O.D.O.K 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.”
With Avengers: The Kang Dynasty up next, we can only hope that Loveness learns from his mistakes and manages to salvage his reputation in the eyes of the MCU fandom, many of whom are expecting the next team-up of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes to disappoint on the back of Quantumania being so lukewarm in every way, shape, and form.
