“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” star Jonathan Majors says that critics’ negative reception of his Marvel movie “doesn’t change” how he sees himself.
On Friday’s episode of IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast, the actor dismissed the poor reviews as only data, adding, “I’m a performance within a story.” With a critics score of 47%, his film is currently tied for the worst-reviewed Marvel movie on aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes.
“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,” said Majors.
“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].”
Majors’ performance as Kang the Conqueror was a highlight in Rotten Tomatoes’ “critics consensus” of the film. But the blurb also said the “Ant-Man” sequel “lacks the spark of fun that elevated earlier adventures.”
Still, the latest entry in the Marvel Cinematic Universe holds an 83% score from the thousands of user-submitted reviews on the site.
Majors, who also has parts this year in “Creed III” and “Magazine Dreams,” told IndieWire that the reviews are just part of the overall picture.
“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,” he said.
Majors’ comments come after the “Ant-Man” sequel’s writer, Jeff Loveness, told The Daily Beast earlier this week that the reviews took him by surprise.
Loveness said that the negative reception put him in a “pretty low spot,” but added that he then went to see the film at a movie theater and watched as the audience laughed at jokes he penned for it.
“I’m pretty happy with it overall, and I think I learned how to take a punch this week,” said Loveness, who is also set to write the screenplay for a follow-up film titled “Avengers: The Kang Dynasty.”
“And now that I learned that it’s not too bad, I can just get on with making things.”