Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania highlights a wider Marvel issue
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Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania hasn't exactly got Phase Five of the MCU off to the most promising start.
Shortly after its release, the threequel matched the record set by Eternals for the lowest-rated MCU movie on Rotten Tomatoes with 47%. It has since rebounded to 48%, so Eternals has the dubious honour all to itself again, but Quantumania is still one of only two MCU movies to be ranked Rotten.
It could take solace in its relatively high audience score of 83%, but even the audience appeared to desert Quantumania in its second weekend. The movie set the record for the biggest week-on-week drop at the US box office for a Marvel movie at a huge 69.9%.
Steep drops after a $100 million-plus opening aren't unusual and the movie still enjoyed the biggest opening for an Ant-Man movie. However, combined with the poor critical response, it's unlikely to rebound as it suggests Marvel fans aren't going back for seconds and casual MCU viewers aren't bothering to see it yet.
But is Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania really one of the worst MCU movies ever? Worse than, say, Iron Man 2, Thor: The Dark World and The Incredible Hulk?
We're not here to mount a defence of Quantumania. Marvel movies in general don't need a defence as with more than $350 million worldwide, it's not exactly struggling and many movies would happily have an unwanted record or two to take that kind of money.
In our review of the Ant-Man threequel, we even pointed out its many flaws such as an overstuffed plot and the feeling it was more of a Kang origin tale than an Ant-Man trilogy capper. It's still an entertaining watch, but you can see exactly why it's got middling reviews across the board.
What we are here to suggest is that Quantumania marks the peak of a trend that's been building with Marvel ever since Iron Man saved the world (again).
Following Avengers: Endgame and Infinity Saga coda Spider-Man: Far From Home, the MCU has had to rebuild. It wasn't exactly starting from scratch, but The Multiverse Saga (as it's now known) was a soft reboot for the world. There were still old favourites, yet there had to be a lot of new characters brought to the board as well.
It resulted in a Phase Four that was criticised for lacking direction, introducing numerous characters with little pay-off. Each Phase of The Infinity Saga had an Avengers movie to cap it, bringing the team together. Here though, without an Avengers movie, Phase Four felt disjointed.
Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige sought to fix that criticism by announcing two Avengers movies at the end of Phase Six. Avengers: The Kang Dynasty and Avengers: Secret Wars would be the MCU's North Star, with the hope that knowing the destination would allay any fan criticisms.
Enter Quantumania, and that hasn't quite happened. Part of the reason could well be that the MCU has course-corrected too far.
Across The Infinity Saga, we knew things were building to a big finale, but those little set-ups and cameos were largely confined to the credit scenes. When those teasers did make it into the main movie, such as in Avengers: Age of Ultron with Thor's vision, fans rightly criticised them for being wedged in.
Quantumania, though, is nearly two hours of set-up with the actual plot relegated to a subplot. We know that Kang is the next Big Bad of the MCU, but Thanos never needed to be the main villain of an MCU movie before his proper entrance in Infinity War.
The issue could be that we'll meet numerous variants of Kang over the movies and TV shows leading up to The Kang Dynasty. There was only one Thanos (well, until Endgame, anyway) so he was a cleaner, easier villain to seed into the story.
But arguably the biggest issue is that Marvel fans are too savvy now. We've watched a lot of MCU content (for want of a better word) and, as such, the standards have changed because of what is expected.
The likes of Iron Man 2, The Incredible Hulk and Thor: The Dark World weren't really better movies than Quantumania. They all suffered from fairly major issues from terrible villains to undercooked subplots, but they were relatively early in the MCU and so their flaws were, if not overlooked, then more forgiven.
Quantumania doesn't have such luxury. We've seen the MCU do better in terms of the movies themselves and also the world-building of the universe, so when given two hours of set-up, we're more inclined to lean towards the negative than the positive.
It's not quite Marvel fatigue. Movies don't open to more than $100 million at the box office if fans truly were fatigued. However, it is a paradigm shift that future MCU outings should be wary of.
The MCU set the standards of an extended universe – and now those standards are coming back to hit it.
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is out now in cinemas, while you can watch pretty much every MCU movie right now on Disney+.
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