With “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” now playing in cinemas everywhere, there’s been a lot of discussion about the quality of the film.
Critics scores wise it is now tied equal last at 47% with “Eternals” for worst Marvel Studios film on Rotten Tomatoes, and sunk below that film by several points with a 48/100 on Metacritic – making it the worst MCU title on that platform to date.
It ain’t just the critics. Whilst the audience score on Rotten Tomatoes is high at 84%, on Metacritic it’s a much more sobering 6.1/10. The same is true on IMDb, where the film’s 6.6/10 score is tied with “Thor: The Dark World” for the second worst MCU score, and the ‘B’ CinemaScore from exit polls is Marvel’s lowest to date.
Disagreements seem to be over various aspects, from how well the film works as a standalone movie due to the amount of MCU exposition, to the quality of the visual effects, to the character development and more.
Some of that may be due to the script and editing, which appears to have made some changes in production. A posting on Instagram over the weekend revealed one element that was cut from the film was new members of the van Dyne family.
The mother of young actor Lucas Grant posted a photo revealing he was at one point meant to play Hope van Dyne’s son in the film with a shot showing actress Evangeline Lilly’s Hope smiling and holding two young children – a boy and a girl. As Grant is meant to be her son in the photo, that suggests the other girl was going to be her daughter.
In the final film there is no indication that Hope has kids, and she sports a different hairstyle than that in the photo suggesting it was a potential alternate timeline variant of the character. Grant will be on screens soon, as he has a role in the upcoming “Five Night at Freddy’s” film adaptation.
“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” marks the first movie in the fifth phase of the MCU and is a key entry to the overall MCU’s future as it sets up Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror villain and his multiple variants.
