Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania sets unfortunate new Rotten Tomatoes milestone for Marvel
First film in the MCU’s ‘Phase Five’ has underwhelmed critics
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Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has set an unfortunate new milestone for Marvel Studios on Rotten Tomatoes.
The film, released in cinemas on Friday (17 February), is now the lowest-scoring sequel in the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
Starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly and Jonathan Majors, Quantumania currently has an aggregated review score of just 51 per cent positive.
This places it below other MCU entries such as 2010’s Iron Man 2 (71 per cent) and 2013’s Thor: The Dark World (66 per cent), two films that are often considered the worst among the Marvel canon.
However, at the time of writing, Quantumania is not quite the lowest-rated MCU film entirely, with Chloé Zhao’s 2021 ensemble feature Eternals currently holing that dubious honour.
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Eternals has a Rotten Tomatoes score of just 47 per cent. With reviews still likely to be added to the website over the coming days, it remains possible, although unlikely, that Quantumania could sink to a new record low for the franchise.
Quantumania is the first film of Marvel’s “Phase Five”, and will see the first cinematic introduction of Majors as Kang the Conqueror.
Having first played the role briefly in season one of the Disney Plus series Loki, Majors is expected to reprise the villain role in a number of forthcoming MCU films, including, most significantly, the next two Avengers team-up movies: The Kang Dynasty (2025) and Secret Wars (2026).
In a three-star review of Quantumania 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 out in cinemas from Friday 17 February.
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