Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has flopped rather significantly, considering it has a critic score of 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and faced a 69 percent drop at the box office in its second week. Common criticisms include: too much MCU exposition and not enough focus on its main characters, over-reliance on bad CGI, a lack ꦉof suspense, and disappointing dialogue. Considering that both of the movie’s predecessors, Ant-Man and Ant-Man and the Wasp did fairly well with critics, this is a sharp change in cri♉tical reception.
Apparently, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s screenwriter, Jeff Loveness, decided he believes negative reviews of the fil💯m to be &ldquo𝔍;wrong” after seeing the audience's reaction at a screening. Interestingly, despite critical reviews, the audience scores for all three movies are 80 percent or higher, so what gives? Why are audiences rating these movies so highly even when it’s almost universally agreed by critics that they’re not good?
The answer is obvious – the MCU isn’t meant to be the pinnacle of art (or even good, really), it’s meant to make money. And to make money, it has to lock in its audiences. Like a snowball, it started by building on existing IP, making movies that were actually pretty good, because they focused on their ch💯aracters, fleshing them out and making them empathetic. The snowball rolled, the characters were linked together, and sequels got🍰 released. Are all these movies good? No, definitely not. But they keep making absurd amounts of money because audiences understood that all the movies were linked, and to miss one or more movies would mean missing references in future movies, and god forbid something fly over our heads.
The problem with the MCU is that fanservice is crucial to its success. I watched Spider-Man: No Way Home in theatres, the first time I’d seen a Marvel movie in person with other people in years, and was gobsmacked at how participatory the experience seemed to be. I might as well have been watching Rocky Horror, with how much the audience was cheering and jeering. Marvel fans have fun watching these movies, and that’s where the money’s at. Every reference they catch, or clue they identify about what’s happening next in the Universe, is a dopamine hit. Every character from a🐽nother film they recognise is a reason to get excited.
So of course Loveness, after seeing an audience’s reaction to the film he wrote, wants to believe the script he wrote was good. But deciding to 𓃲listen to audiences instead of critics, in this case, is caving to the comforts of confirmation bias, and if critics are saying similar things across the board, maybe you should listen to them. Otherwise, you end up making the same old shallow, formulaic Marvel film that gets churned out multiple times a year to keep that sweet, sweet money flowing, and god knows, we don’t need more of that.