‘Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania’ screenwriter sounds off on the movie’s critical drubbing

Walt Disney Pictures/Marvel Studios

(NOTE LANGUAGE) While Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania currently has a respectable 83% Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes, the movie received a nearly record-low Critics Score for a Marvel movie, with 48%.

Its Emmy-winning screenwriter Jeff Loveness tells The Daily Beast he witnessed this disconnect firsthand.

“To be honest, those reviews took me by surprise,” the Rick and Morty vet explains. “I was in a pretty low spot … Those were not good reviews, and I was like, ‘What the … ?'”

He continued, “I’m really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan [Majors, who plays Kang the Conqueror] and Michelle Pfeiffer [Janet van Dyne]. I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it.”

However, Loveness saw the other side of the coin when he saw the movie with actual moviegoers. “The audience was laughing … I’m like, Godd***! No, [the reviews] are wrong! I’m right! MODOK is great!” he said of Corey Stoll‘s big-headed, pretty-out-there baddie, ripped right from the pages of Marvel Comics.

The writer explains, “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.”

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