Disney Reveals $200 Million Spending On Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania

Disney has revealed that it spent $193.2 million (£156.5 million) on pre-production and filming Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, its latest movie based on Marvel Comics characters.

Quantumania is the third film in the Ant-Man series and stars Paul Rudd as the eponymous hero who teams up with Michael Douglas and Michelle Pfeiffer to stop a time-traveling conqueror called Kang. Its blockbuster budget makes it tough for Disney to turn a profit on the film which has been panned by critics and has grossed less at the box office than almost every other Marvel Studios movie.

According to industry monitor Box Office Mojo, Quantumania has only generated $470.9 million worldwide since it was launched in February. It has lower takings than both of its predecessors and lies in 25th place when all 31 Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) movies are ranked by box office.

Theaters retain around 50% of its takings with the remainder going to Disney giving it around $235.5 million. This would be just enough to make a profit if its costs were capped at pre-production and filming but that is far from the case.

The movie’s title refers to the microscopic Quantum Realm which acts as a portal to other time periods and looks like the cover of an eighties rock album. Backdrops in the film show forks of lightning from purple clouds striking ruined rock forts set on sweeping deserts. They are home to a bizarre range of aliens including one made of Jell-O and others with blank screens for faces.

The psychedelic visuals were created in post-production by a raft of VFX firms, including Disney’s Industrial Light & Magic, MPC and Luma Pictures. The vast majority of the movie is set in the Quantum Realm which increased the workload after filming and sent the costs soaring far beyond the amount that had already been spent. Testimony to this, a spokesperson for Disney says “we would imagine the final spend on the film would be higher, given post-production work would have been undertaken”.

It puts the budget at much more than the estimated $200 million and there is no doubt about the data that backs up this assessment.

Movie budgets are usually a closely guarded secret as studios tend to include the cost of individual films in their overall expenses. Films shot in the United Kingdom are exceptions to this as their costs are consolidated in single companies which file annual financial statements. Director Peyton Reed chose to film Quantumania in the UK and it had a magic touch.

Studios shooting there qualify for the UK government’s Film Tax Relief which allows them to get a reimbursement of up to 25% of the money they spend in the country. The reimbursement can only be paid to a company which is responsible for everything from pre-production to delivery of the movie and paying for services relating to it. Studios usually set up one company to make each movie and they tend to have code names to stop them raising attention with fans when they file permits to film on location.

The Disney subsidiary behind Quantumania is called Pym Productions III in a nod to the Pym particles which enable Ant-Man to shrink. Its latest financial statements show that it spent a total of $193.2 million (£156.5 million) between November 2019, when the company was founded, and December 31 2021.

As this author recently revealed in the Daily Mail newspaper, Quantumania received a $37 million (£30 million) reimbursement which represented a staggering 8.3% of the total paid to all movies made in the UK in the year to March 2022.

The $193.2 million of spending covers the entire pre-production and filming period as shooting began in July 2021 and wrapped in November the same year. Post-production took more than a year which is around three times longer than the time spent on filming. This gives an indication of how much it cost and it is also the source of many complaints about the movie.

Quantumania is only the second MCU movie to be rated “Rotten” by review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. Although it got an 83% audience score, only 47% of critics were positive about it with one of their biggest gripes being the VFX. Some said it has “generic” visual effects that look like “CGI glop” and are “very flat and cruddy-looking.”

This was widely put down to the high number of productions in Marvel’s pipeline which has triggered complaints from VFX artists. However, some critics said that the effects in Quantumania seem to be inspired by 2005 children’s movie The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. There may be good reason for this.

Disney appears to have taken an approach with the MCU which can be summarised as the ‘Three Is’ – Innovation, Institutionalisation and Iteration.

The early MCU movies innovated by grounding their characters in the real world. They dispensed with typical superhero tropes like secret identities and gaudy costumes. Further challenging conventions, Marvel hired a heavyweight cast including Scarlett Johansson and Robert Downey Jr. The studio didn’t even cut corners on voice work with Britain’s Paul Bettany playing an artificial intelligence program.

The movies were a hit with adults as they treated cherished characters from their childhood seriously. In turn, this enabled parents to enjoy the movies with their own children thereby fueling the MCU machine.

When 2012 team-up movie The Avengers became the first MCU movie to cross the $1 billion mark, the franchise gained even more importance to Disney. It began a process of institutionalisation leading to movies based on characters who appeal to a diverse range of groups to maximise takings.

The past five years alone have seen the MCU introduce Chinese superheroes in Shang-Chi, a deaf superhero in Eternals and a British librarian with the split personality of an American adventurer who moonlights as an Arabic-inspired anti-hero played by Oscar Isaac. It certainly represents a diverse cross-section of society.

Covering all bases means directly targeting kids which is why 20 year-old Iman Vellani took the role of Marvel’s first Muslim superhero Ms. Marvel last year and a young Avengers team is even understood to be on the horizon. Given this backdrop, it’s hardly a surprise that many of the latest MCU movies seem to have forgotten their real-world grounding and many are set in new alien dimensions.

Kids and comic fans don’t tend to watch the movies to admire cutting-edge visuals but because they want to know what happens next in the MCU’s interconnected story. The fans know what they are in for based on the trailers alone so they enjoy the experience whereas critics come away disappointed because of the stark contrast with the ethos of the original movies. They are still looking for a return to Marvel’s innovative roots which explains why the critics’ ratings of recent MCU movies have been far lower than the audience scores.

Quantumania doesn’t pretend to be anything other than a movie about a comic book character. Almost all traces of original director Edgar Wright’s down-to-earth story about a reformed thief have been lost. That’s no bad thing if you’re happy instead to marvel at how the twisting and turning storyline stays consistent despite jumping from one timeline to the next.

Nowhere are its comic book origins more apparent than in the final scene of the movie which shows an arena full of rowdy Kangs from different timelines gathered to wage war on the heroes. It’s hard to suspend disbelief at that scene, especially as the villains look like a mindless rabble rather than a sinister threat. Even hardened fans might see it as jumping the shark.

There’s no doubt that the absence of tension is a far cry from the stinger at the end of the first Avengers movie. It gave audiences a glimpse of the menacing villain who had orchestrated an attack on a world which had been carefully created to replicate the one we actually live in. It seemed like such a genuine threat that some younger members of the audience believed it was real whilst adults got carried away with the hype.

It culminated in 2019’s Avengers: Endgame which became the second highest-grossing movie of all time with total takings of $2.8 billion. Some said Marvel wouldn’t be able to top it but it was driven forward by the third of the ‘Three Is’ – iteration.

Marvel has made so many movies and shows on the Disney Plus streaming platform that even the studio’s president Kevin Feige recently said it needs to slow down. “The pace at which we are putting out the Disney Plus shows will change so they can each get a chance to shine,” he told Entertainment Weekly in February.

In its pursuit of the Dollar, Marvel has forgotten that a lot of the hype around the original Star Wars trilogy was fueled by fans having to wait years for the next instalment. The same was true with the original Marvel movies but there are now so many that even devoted fans struggle to keep up with them all. The more movies there are, the more Marvel needs to mine its more fantastical storylines to come up with new plots and the less believable they become. It doesn’t stop there.

The preponderance of productions doesn’t just saturate the market and lessen the exclusivity of the movies, it also weakens one of their key selling points which is their inter-connectivity.

From the beginning, Marvel carefully connected the storylines of its movies so fans had to watch them all to follow the plot. It was another selling point of the series but Marvel is now paying the price for it. If fans miss one movie there’s less incentive for them to watch another in case they don’t understand it. All it takes is one badly-received movie to start this vicious circle and Marvel has had a few of them in recent years. That could be just the start.

If A Listers get jitters about appearing in MCU movies the problem could snowball. Based on recent performance, it would be understandable if the talent were concerned about the film being a flop, being ridiculed or branded a kids’ movie. That might not be the only reason for talent to politely decline the opportunity to appear in future MCU movies.

Just last month Marvel unexpectedly fired its president of physical and post-production, VFX and animation production, Victoria Alonso. She had been with Marvel Studios from the start, 18 years ago, and was seen as being one of its biggest hitters so it wouldn’t be a surprise if some of her closest allies jump ship too.

Some have seen her as being a scapegoat for the studio’s struggles, especially given the fierce criticism of its VFX. However, Alonso was reportedly fired for promoting the historical drama she produced, Argentina, 1985. It is understood that she disputes this though it remains to be seen whether she will mount a legal challenge. That’s not the kind of publicity that Marvel likes but it may have to get used to it.

Capping off an awful month for Marvel, Kang actor Jonathan Majors was arrested on assault and harassment charges last week. He denies them and it remains to be seen if this too will end up in court.

Marvel’s hopes are now pinned on the next entry in the MCU which is coming in May but even that can’t give the studio the happy ending it is looking for.

The movie is the third instalment in the hugely popular Guardians of the Galaxy series about a team of alien misfits. The visionary who brought them to the big screen is James Gunn who was unceremoniously dropped by Disney in 2018 due to inappropriate comments he made years earlier.

Disney’s chief executive Bob Iger went to great lengths to get Gunn back onboard only for him to leave again after Bob Chapek took control of the studio. It puts Disney in a Catch 22 as if the movie performs poorly it will pile even more pressure on Marvel Studios and if is a success it won’t be able to repeat it with the brains behind the trilogy.

Iger returned to the helm of Disney in November so he will have to watch this unfold. Even more embarrassingly, Gunn’s new role is heading up arch-rival DC Studios so if Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 is a success it will draw attention to Marvel’s chief competitor. It’s a dilemma that even the Avengers might not be able to resolve.