The Marvel Cinematic Universe's first 2023 movie is here with the third Ant-Man! The superhero film is the 31st of the franchise and the first for Phase 5. Ahead of its theatrical release, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania earned an unfortunate distinction of getting a “rotten” score by critics on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. It’s one of two movies in the MCU to get the green splat, but general moviegoers seem to think differently about Quantumania.
Quantumania’s opening night on Thursday brought in $17.5 million ahead of a predicted $100 million debut weekend, per CNBC. Amidst this, thousands of Marvel fans put in their scores for the movie on Rotten Tomatoes. The audience score for the Ant-Man sequel has debuted way better than the critics score, currently standing at 84%, in contrast to the Tomatometer score of 48%. It looks like we have another crowd pleaser that didn’t impress reviewers!
Quantumania’s critic score is comparable to 2021’s Eternals score, which came out to 47% against an audience score of 77%. They are “rotten” outliers in an otherwise mostly positive streak for Marvel Studios, which has pulled “fresh” scores on many occasions over the years. 2018’s Black Panther has the highest critics score for a Marvel movie with 96%.
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As far as audience score trends, moviegoers have generally loved MCU movies over the years on Rotten Tomatoes. The only time a Marvel film has received a “rotten” score from audiences was with 2019’s Captain Marvel, and it is believed that the score for that movie was sabotaged by trolls, even directly leading Rotten Tomatoes to change the functionality of its audience score at the time.
So while many critics were not happy with Marvel’s direction for Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, a lot of people seem to be walking out of the theater already with different opinions and happier feelings about the latest MCU entry. CinemaBlend had some divided feelings about the movie, with our Quantumania review from Eric Eisenberg giving the movie 2 out of 5 stars, calling it a “clunker.” On the other hand, Sean O’Connell gave the movie a 4 out of 5 in our site’s Quantumania spoiler-free video review.
In other words, this movie is going to get fans talking, and there’s sure to be some distinction across the fandom regarding where it stands in comparison to other Marvel movies. You can certainly decide for yourself what you think about Paul Rudd’s return to his superhero character and the introduction of Jonathan Majors’ Kang the Conqueror with Quantumania out in theaters now. Once you’ve seen it, check out our breakdown of the Ant-Man 3 end-credits scenes to follow along regarding what the repercussions could be for future MCU movies.
