Jonathan Majors responds to abysmal Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania reviews

Jonathan Majors has commented on Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’s disappointing critical reception.

Majors stars as the villain, Kang the Conqueror, in the Paul Rudd-starring Marvel franchise’s third instalment.

Since its 17 February release, Quantumania’s dismal reviews have made it Rotten Tomatoes’ lowest-scoring sequel in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).

It currently stands at just 47 per cent on the popular review aggregation site – now level with the lowest-scoring Marvel movie ever: Chloe Zhao’s 2021 ensemble feature, Eternals.

Majors was asked about his take on the film’s poor reception on IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast this week.

“It doesn’t change how I see myself. Period. It’s all data,” Majors said.

“I’m a performance within a story. One thing I will say to my team as we’re leaving a premiere if they’re reading reviews, I’ll say, ‘How’s the movie doing?’ I try to clean my plate and take care of my part. The response is: ‘You’re straight. You’re good. They like you.’ And they tell me about the movie. Sometimes the movie is also on that level, and sometimes [it’s not].”

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“It’s just people,” Majors added about film critics.

“They have an opinion. You always have an opinion. I’m no fool. I know these are people writing it. These aren’t my Yale professors or my drama teachers. These are people who have kids and they have a perspective, they have a religious upbringing or a lack thereof. They live in this town, or they want to be seen in this way or don’t want to be seen in this way.

“I look at the aggregate and, ok, 47. But what does that 47 mean when you also got this amount of box office? What do these things mean? It’s information. I am in the know. I won’t play myself. If you are a critic on a level, I probably know you and understand your politics.”

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The film had previously been defended by its screenwriter, Jeff Loveness. “To be honest, those reviews took me by surprise,” he told The Daily Beast. “I was in a pretty low spot… Those were not good reviews, and I was like, ‘What the…?’”

He continued: “I’m really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan [Majors] and Michelle Pfeiffer.

“I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it.”

Majors’s turn as Marvel’s next major villain after Thanos was picked out by critics as one of the film’s few redeeming features.

In a three-star review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey praised Majors’s performance, writing: “Majors has pulled off the seemingly impossible. It’s as if he’s forced Marvel to orbit around the force of his own charisma.

“He delivers dry-as-Weetabix dialogue about timelines and variants with such solemnity, you’d be fooled into thinking he was talking about something actually real.”

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is in cinemas now.