Well, the cat’s out of the bag: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania was a total bust.
Aside from tying with Eternals for the poorest Rotten Tomatoes score in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s history, Ant-Man’s threequel was also home to numerous criticisms over its CGI. In fact, the movie has received such repeated complaints over its CGI that one can’t help but wonder if the MCU is suddenly working with a shrunken budget.
Thor: Love and Thunder and Black Widow were two Phase Four films that kicked off the discussion over the MCU’s deteriorating CGI, and while many hoped Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania would put the conversation to bed, unfortunately, the opposite happened.
At times, scenes from the movie looked like something out of an early 2000s Spy Kids movie. We were offered brief moments of reprieve when Kang (Jonathan Majors) and Scott (Paul Rudd) met for the first time or when Scott and his family gathered around the kitchen table, but aside from that, it was a battle to stay invested in the storyline while constantly being inundated with subpar CGI distracting us in the background.
This begs the question of how much money Marvel invested into Quantumania. For a film that was lauded as the launching pad for a new era of the MCU, surely it’d been given a decent amount of money to blow. Right?
How much did Marvel shell out for its Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania budget?
The worst part about the CGI in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is that it can’t be attested to the film’s budget. The threequel had the largest budget of all three Ant-Man films, working with a total of $200 million USD, according to IndieWire.
The first Ant-Man movie had a budget of $130 million while the second had between $130 to $195 million. One would think Quantumania’s increased budget would help, not hurt, but this is coming from the same studio that brought us Thor: Love and Thunder on a $250 million budget, and we all know how that turned out.
As a matter of fact, the CGI in Quantumania likely isn’t linked to its budget at all. Shortly after the film’s premiere, a VFX artist for the film revealed that “shortcuts” were taken amid shocking working conditions. Moreover, it wasn’t the first time Marvel came under fire for treating its employees only slightly better than trash cans.
It leads one to worry about whether the MCU can actually handle a film as ambitious as Avengers: The Kang Dynasty. As they say, time will tell, but that’s also what we said last time too.