Quantumania’ Has Marvel’s Second-Ever Rotten Review Score

Uh oh.

That was my first thought when I saw the review scores rolling in for Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, the third Ant-Man movie, but a seemingly important one to set up the MCU’s Phase 4 villain, Kang.

As it stands, with 140 reviews in, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has 53% on Rotten Tomatoes. That’s a dismal score for an MCU feature, and marks only the second time that an MCU movie has had a “rotten” (below 60%) score on the site, the first time being Eternals in 2021. So it does seem like something has gone very wrong here.

As it stands, here are the bottom 10 MCU movies, with Quantumania now being the second worst-reviewed ever:

• Captain America: The First Avenger – 80%
• Thor – 77%
• Avengers: Age of Ultron – 76%
• Iron Man 2 – 71%
• Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness – 74%
• The Incredible Hulk – 67%
• Thor: The Dark World – 66%
• Thor: Love and Thunder – 64%
• Ant-Man And The Wasp: Quantumania – 53%
• Eternals – 47%

Notably, Quantumania is also significantly lower than the past two Ant-Man movies, where the first one had an 83% and the second had an 87%. They were never really considered top-tier Marvel movies but this is a huge drop.

What’s wrong with the movie? Quite a lot, it seems but a whole lot of critics seem to focus on the visuals:

Mashable: “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is a chaotic, woefully unfunny mess that has forgotten why its hero was such fun. The thrill isn’t just gone, it’s been buried beneath a swarm of plot contrivances and truly hideous CGI.”

Whynow: “Visually, the film is messy and flat; the CGI is shockingly poor and the action looks muddled. At least Quantumania has one of the best casts in a Marvel film.”

The Atlantic: “The story is in service of the larger Marvel engine, an increasingly creaky machine that nevertheless keeps grinding away, dropping superstar performers into CGI glop because the show simply must go on.”

Taking place almost entirely in the Quantum Zone, the film is in turn almost completely CGI, and even in the trailers it looked like that could be a problem. We know there’s currently a visual effects shortage in Hollywood, in part because of the demands of places like Marvel, and perhaps this was too much work given not enough time and the end result is just…not very good. This is contrast to Eternals, the other “bad” Marvel film that I’d argue was better than critics said, and there, the visuals were rather fantastic. The story was the main issue there.

Of course, many MCU fans may wait and see what audience scores are like. Generally speaking, audience scores trend higher than critics for most superhero offerings, and I would probably expect that to be the case here. But I would be surprised if this was a huge disparity as this always seemed like a pretty risky film. I also think it may be worth noting that so many new Marvel films keep popping up in the bottom ten here, like the even higher profile Thor: Love and Thunder and Multiverse of Madness. The MCU does feel like it’s lost a bit of magic in phase 4 here.

Update (2/17): Two things have happened since I published this article:

First, the Rotten Tomatoes score of Quantumania has sunk even lower. It’s now a 49% with 226 reviews in, just 2% higher than Eternals, the ultimate low water mark for MCU movies.

Second, since the movie is actually out now, user scores are in and they are not just higher than critics, which you might expect, but much higher, currently at an 84%. That’s one of the largest spreads I’ve seen in either direction for an MCU movie, and higher than Eternals’ split, where that was 47% versus 77%. It may go down over time, as you might expect people who are rushing out to see the third Ant-Man movie on opening day may in fact be bigger-than-average fans. Still, if it can hold those numbers, that’s at least decent new for Marvel even if critics seem to hate it.

Still, this isn’t what Marvel wants to see in any case. They have really prided themselves on not missing very often in the MCU, even with hard-to-play critics. It says something that out of 30+ MCU features in a decade and a half, that there are literally only two with sub 60% scores. That’s obviously something DC can’t say, as the DCEU boasts a number of films under that mark, and early on often split between high audience scores for Snyder-era films and low critic scores. We’ll see how that may change in the James Gunn era, who has produced some of the highest rated content for DC.

I do wonder if a few more reviews may sink Quantumania below Eternals, though I will say in the middle to bottom ranking order of MCU movies by critic scores, I think they got a long wrong. Some things like Thor 2 we can agree should be down there, but I think critics have gotten more harsh lately as Eternals and Multiverse of Madness are all better than they say. And now, maybe Quantumania, but I’m going to need to see it for myself to know for sure.

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