‘Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania’ writer was ‘despondent’ about the movie’s bad reviews

Liam Mathews
·2 min read
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“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” is one of the worst-reviewed Marvel movies to date. It has a 48% “Rotten” score on Rotten Tomatoes, which puts it neck-and-neck with “Eternals,” the lowest-scored Marvel movie on the review aggregator at 47%. And audiences aren’t loving it the way they love other Marvel movies, either; it suffered a 69% decline at the box office in its second weekend, the second-biggest drop in Marvel history, according to Variety.

The movie’s underperformance has been hard on screenwriter Jeff Loveness. “To be honest, those reviews took me by surprise,” Loveness told The Daily Beast. “I was in a pretty low spot… Those were not good reviews, and I was like, ‘What the …?’”

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Loveness, who won an Emmy in 2020 for writing “The Vat of Acid Episode” of “Rick and Morty,”  made his feature debut on the movie, which launches Kang the Conquerer (Jonathan Majors), the big bad of Marvel’s Phase Five.  

“I’m really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan and Michelle Pfeiffer,” said Loveness. “I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it.”

He felt better after he went to an opening weekend showing of the movie after reviews had come out and saw audience members laughing and enjoying the movie. 

“I’m like, ‘Goddamn! No, [the reviews] are wrong! I’m right! M.O.D.O.K. [Corey Stoll] is great!’” he said. “I’m pretty happy with it overall, and I think I learned how to take a punch this week. And now that I learned that it’s not too bad, I can just get on with making things.”

And he will keep making things. He’s currently working on the script for “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty,” an epic team-up slated for 2025. 

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