Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was not well-received by critics (it's actually only the second MCU movie to drop to "rotten" status on Rotten Tomatoes after Eternals), and the reception was not something writer Jeff Loveness was prepared for.
While speaking to The Daily Beast about the threequel's (mostly) negative reviews, Loveness admitted that the critical drubbing came out of left field, and, understandably, he did not feel great about it.
“To be honest, those reviews took me by surprise. I was in a pretty low spot. Those were not good reviews, and I was like, ‘What the …?’”
“I’m really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan [Majors] and Michelle Pfeiffer,” Loveness continued. “I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it.”
Loveness says attending a public screening of Quantumania during its opening weekend cheered him up a bit, as the audience reacted well to a lot of the jokes he had added to the script.
“I’m like, ‘Goddamn! No, [the reviews] are wrong! I’m right! MODOK is great!’” he added. “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.”
While it's true that cinemagoers did appear to be responding a lot more positively than critics at first, Ant-Man 3 recently suffered the biggest second-week box office drop for a Marvel Studios movie.
Comedy is completely subjective, of course, but one major criticism of Quantumania was that a lot of the humor simply failed to hit the mark.
“I just miss gags in movies that were unabashedly dumb,” he says of his goal with the film’s comedic elements. “I like movies that had big gags and weren’t trying to be super-grounded all the time. I think ‘grounded’ is the most overrated word in comedies … Like, I don’t give a shit. I wanna see movies that have jokes and funny characters and heightened situations.”
Loveness is currently working on the script for Avengers: The Kang Dynasty, which, to be frank, a lot of fans are now just a little concerned about!