Jonathan Majors Addresses Negative ANT-MAN 3 Reviews and How It Doesn't Change How He Sees Himself
Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania is one of the worst-reviewed movies in the history of the MCU. Critics and audiences have not been kind to it, and that’s because it has a lot of issues. If you can look beyond those issues, though, it can be a fun movie.
Regardless of the bad reviews, there is one aspect of the film that most fans are praising, and that’s Jonathan Majors’ performance as Kang The Conqueror. He was awesome in that role, and in a recent interview with IndieWire’s “Screen Talk” podcast the actor addressed those terrible reviews, saying:
“It doesn’t change how I see myself, period. It’s all data. I’m a performance within a story. One thing I will say to my team as we’re leaving a premiere if they’re reading reviews, I’ll say, ‘How’s the movie doing?’ I try to clean my plate and take care of my part. The response is: ‘You’re straight. You’re good. They like you.’ And they tell me about the movie. Sometimes the movie is also on that level, and sometimes [it’s not].”
Majors then talked about the critics writing these reviews, saying:
“It’s just people. They have an opinion. You always have an opinion. I’m no fool. I know these are people writing it. These aren’t my Yale professors or my drama teachers. These are people who have kids and they have a perspective, they have a religious upbringing or a lack thereof. They live in this town, or they want to be seen in this way or don’t want to be seen in this way. I look at the aggregate and, ok, 47. But what does that 47 mean when you also got this amount of box office? What do these things mean? It’s information. I am in the know. I won’t play myself. If you are a critic on a level, I probably know you and understand your politics.”
I love his outlook on this! He has such a refreshing attitude towards reviews and his understanding of them and the people who write them.
The film’s screenwriter, Jeff Loveness, had a very different reaction to the bad reviews, previously saying: “To be honest, those reviews took me by surprise.” He went on to say that these reviews put him in “a pretty low spot… Those were not good reviews, and I was like, ‘What the …?’”
The big difference is that Jonathan Majors was great in the film, but the script for the movie… not so much. Regardless, he is proud of what he did with certain characters, saying: “I’m really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan Majors and Michelle Pfeiffer [scientist Janet Pym]. I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it.”
Loveness also went on to say: “I’m like, ‘Goddamn! No, [the reviews] are wrong! I’m right! MODOK is great!’ 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.”
What are your thoughts on what Majors had to say?