Mainstream critics hated Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania. (Our own Emily Tsiao agreed with their collective assessment, and she also added some content criticisms you likely won’t find in those reviews.) The third Ant-Man flick clocked in at just 47% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. And for those scoring at home, that makes it the worst-reviewed Marvel Cinematic Universe film to date. (Well, co-worst: 2021’s Eternals also notched a lowly 47% fresh on the popular movie-review aggregator site.)
Audiences, though, mostly responded by saying, “Hold my Quantum Realm shrinking machine.” They flocked to the 31st MCU offering, to the tune of an estimated $105.5 million domestically (and $120 million for the four-day holiday weekend).
Is that good, you ask? Why yes, yes it is. That’s the best opening frame for the Ant-Man series, and the third-best February and Presidents Day weekend ever (trailing only 2018’s Black Panther and 2016’s Deadpool). Toss in an additional $239.3 million from overseas, and this poorly reviewed movie is already laughing all the way to the bank with $357.3 million in Quantum quarters after just four days of release.
We’ll see next week if tepid scores combined with the shellacking the film has taken from critics translates into a sharper-than-normal falloff when we report back next Monday.
Meanwhile, James Cameron has sunk his own movie. That being Titanic, of course. Avatar: The Way of Water may not have been No. 1 last weekend, but the film’s $6.1 million domestic haul over the weekend helped to push the sci-fi sequel’s total take (including international receipts) to $2.432 billion to inch past Titanic to No. 3 on the worldwide box-office list. Only Avengers: Endgame and 2009’s Avatar have garnered more ($2.8 and 2.9 billion, respectively).
Moving down this week’s Top 5 list, Magic Mike’s Last Dance continued to work its bit of beguiling (and sensual) prestidigitation on audience, pulling another $5.4 million out of the hat. Next up, Puss in Boots: The Last Wishcontinued its surprisingly strong box-office march as well, pawing in another $5.3 million. Rounding out the Top 5, the apocalyptic horror thriller Knock at the Cabin added $3.9 million in its third weekend outing.
Next weekend sees the arrival of Jesus Revolution, which tells the true story of the Jesus movement in the early 1970s. But Cocaine Bear hopes to take a bite of the box office, too. We’ll see what that unlikely pair of challengers has to say about the Top 5 list next Monday.
11 Responses
– My comment is a slight complaint on recent reviews. In Emily’s review of Quantumania, she said Cassie “appears to ogle a female warrior”. Um, no. She watches her fight some faceless bad guys and then mutters “that’s so cool”. Let’s not insert possible gay fear where it is not needed. I left my kids at home over more Disney gayness and it wasn’t there. Additionally, there was less cursing than was mentioned in this review. Overall, I really appreciate this service, but let’s be a bit less knee jerk over non-existent items.
-Good take.
-If Quantumania is anywhere near as bad as Eternals (both content-wise and quality-wise), I’ll be shocked. I’ve seen nearly every Marvel film in existence and Eternals is by far the biggest clunker of them all in my opinion.
-Agreed. Eternals was awful
-I’ll be very interested to see if Antman 3 (and the MCU as a whole) can overcome the bad reviews/word of mouth. I personally haven’t watched any Marvel movie post-2019 (minus No Way Home, which was pretty good, albeit rather overhyped), so I’m curious to know how big of an appetite there is for MCU films going forward.
-I will say I tremendously enjoyed Black Widow. I loved most of No Way Home except for the ending, which I thought ruined the progression of the film and of its trilogy. I enjoyed Shang-Chi and Black Panther 2 but thought both had the same problem, trying to explore stories of grief in a setting where “grief” doesn’t matter (you could theoretically just pluck what you want out of a different universe).
Probably Wanda’s storyline is the one that most effectively explores grief. She actually DID try to pluck what she wanted out of a different universe (Dr. Strange II) as well as creating an alternate reality (WandaVision), and neither one worked.
-Thank you for specifying that, I appreciate it! I “watched” Doctor Strange 2 and Thor 4, but only as background music on Disney+. I need to go back and at least give the former a fairer chance since I loved its predecessor. I haven’t watched WandaVision but may have to give that a try.
Based on Plugged-In’s review, I almost avoided Quantumania, but I’ve been so missing seeing a movie in a theater (because I have been boycotting all the LGBTQ stuff in Lightyear, Strange World, etc., and the eastern worldview in Dr.Strange and others, etc.) that I took my four teenaged daughters to it anyway. I’m glad we did — it was fun, enjoyable, had good family values, fun heroics, even some humor! and NO LGTBQ+ nonsense! I felt that most of the negatives listed in Plugged-In’s review weren’t actually there in the movie.
Agreed! It felt like she imagined a lot of the content. Weird, cause they’re normally accurate.
Just want to point out that what she had said was one short scene, and only said it could be that, not that it was.
That said, I and my (both young adult) sister enjoyed this movie, but we both agreed that it wasn’t as funny as the previous two, and that a lot of the quantum realm plot was just disorienting. Would’ve been funnier if Luis was in it more.