Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania has officially entered the public fold, and while a step forward in the Multiverse Saga is a step forward in the Multiverse Saga, we don’t think the film’s abysmal Rotten Tomatoes score will be recovering any time soon.
Indeed, a business-as-usual masterclass from Jonathan Majors wasn’t enough to hold Scott Lang’s third outing together. Whether the second-biggest culprit was the woeful script or palpable tonal dissonance is a matter of opinion, but it’s safe to say that Quantumania‘s greatest weakness was the way it was played up by Marvel Studios.
For a film that was marketed not only as the first big step of Phase Five but as an equally big step away from the wishy-washy ethos of Phase Four, Quantumania missed the mark on both fronts. And while we can chalk up the latter to Quantumania likely being more-or-less finished around the time that Marvel first announced its quality-over-quantity intentions for the future, some folks on r/marvelstudios aren’t convinced that the Phase Four curse has been left behind.
Plenty of users pointed out how the many phases of the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been effectively arbitrary for quite a while now. A lack of coherent direction may have plagued the franchise following Avengers: Endgame, but perhaps this was less to do with the tone of what we know as Phase Four and more to do with the over-saturation of content we got from Disney Plus, even if it was the source for some of Marvel’s best content over the last two or so years.
Others suggested that the arbitrariness of Phase Four is further amplified by how well one could have slotted Spider-Man: Far From Home into Phase Four, or the first Ant-Man film into Phase Two.
But one user countered this, suggesting that the aforementioned films followed an “epilogue” formula, whose absence played a role in Phase Four’s messy narrative-building.
And some users made like M.O.D.O.K. and refused to contribute anything helpful.
The moral of the story is to probably stop demonizing the Phase Four umbrella, as Marvel has proved that just because Phase Five has begun, it doesn’t mean that all the problems it had with its Phase Four content are magically solved. Thor: Love and Thunder wasn’t a bad movie because it was a Phase Four movie, it was a bad movie because it was a bad movie. The same will apply to any stinkers that come out of Phase Five or Six, and that’s a reality we’ll all have to accept going forward.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is now playing in theaters.