The smartest way to hate ‘Quantumania’ is for what it isn’t, not what it turned out to be

Now that Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is streaming on Disney Plus, even the staunchest of Marvel Cinematic Universe fans have resigned themselves to the fact that it was a massive missed opportunity, while those who disagree and actively enjoyed the Phase Five kickoff are being sneered at.

There’s no conceivable metric by which Peyton Reed’s threequel was a success, and that ranges from a joint franchise-low Rotten Tomatoes score to its status as both the lowest-grossing Ant-Man adventure and worst-performing sequel in the entire history of the all-conquering comic book juggernaut.

However, the smartest way to hate Quantumania – if you’re feeling that way inclined, of course – is to call it out for the things it wasn’t, as opposed to what it tried to be and failed to achieve. Reed said during the buildup that he was sick and tired of being treated as the palate cleanser between Avengers epics, but that’s exactly what Ant-Man was supposed to be.

The first two succeeded because they were deliberately crafted to have lower stakes, a more self-contained story, and a lightness of touch that audiences needed every now and again between the world and universe-saving shenanigans that most of the MCU’s other marquee heroes find themselves embedded in.

Ditching Michael Peña was a fairly unforgivable sin in and of itself, but nobody was really asking for Scott Lang to be the character who lit the touchpaper on the MCU’s newest big bad and ignited the build towards The Kang Dynasty and Secret Invasion. That’s not to say he shouldn’t have been, but he could have only done it in a vastly better film.

There’s no harm or shame in a property trying to reinvent itself, but Quantumania aimed too high and tried to do much, with its single biggest flaw being its deliberate omission of the very things that made the first two so popular and well-received to begin with.