Fresh off his performance across from Michael B. Jordan in Creed III, Jonathan Majors isn’t too concerned about the bad reviews for February’s Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
The 33-year-old shared his thoughts on the topic in an interview on IndieWire’s Screen Talk podcast. The latest installment of the MCU’s Paul Rudd-starring series has earned historically negative reviews, holding a 48 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, which slots it behind only the record-low Eternals (47 percent) as the worst-reviewed Marvel film yet.
Asked how those Quantumania reviews “play a role in the way you see yourself,” Majors said with a laugh at the 40:00 mark below, “Well, I can jump to the end [of the question]: it doesn’t change how I see myself, period. … It’s all data. I’m a performance within a story, you know? One thing I will say to my team as we’re leaving a premiere, if everyone’s reading reviews, I’ll say, ‘How’s the movie doing?’ I try to clean my plate and take care of my part. And their response is: ‘You’re straight, you’re good, they like you.’ And then they tell me about the movie. And then sometimes the movie is also on the level, sometimes the movie is, you know—but then you realize, it’s people.”
Later Majors admitted he, “as a human being,” on some level does care what his critics think of his art. But first he continued on the subject of criticism, hashing it out with the film journalists hosting Screen Talk.
“They have an opinion,” he said. “You always have an opinion. … I’m no fool, I’ve got 33 years of living, real living, where I go, I know these are people writing it, right? These aren’t my Yale professors, these are not my UNCSA drama teachers. These are people who have kids, who have a perspective, probably have a religious upbringing or the lack thereof. Or live in this town, or live in this town, or wanna be seen in this way, or don’t like being seen in this way. … So I look at the aggregate and I go, ‘OK, cool, 47 [percent], great—but how do you compare that, what does that 47 mean when you also got this X, X, X, X amount of box office?’ … What do these things mean? In my opinion, it’s information, depending on who I’m talking to. But I am in the know, I won’t play myself. If you are a critic on the level, I probably know you...and understand your politics.”
At the 42-minute mark, Majors brought it full circle, explaining that critics do in fact do occupy a role in the ecosystem of the world of entertainment. “If theater and art is the sort-of democracy, which I believe, critics are political writers, you know what I mean? You are a political writer. I am an actor, a politician, a citizen, all of these things are true. I find it quite fascinating. That said, I’m a human being like anybody else: if someone say something crazy about the movie, I go, ‘Oh man, we’ve got Creed coming out, alright. … But don’t forget we still got Ant-Man going.”
Box office numbers showed Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania sustaining the hardest decline for a movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Though it repeated in the No. 1 spot, it dropped from a $105 million opening to a $32.2 million haul last weekend.
Majors concluded by encouraging critics to remember that he, along with his acting peers, have put huge amounts of time and love into their work. “I invested in these things, that’s the other part, like, guys: the artists and filmmakers that made these movies invested years, sometimes, into the two hours and 15 minutes that you see—I’m not saying be nice. I’m just saying understand that it’s a real transaction that’s happening when you put pen to paper.”
Listen to Jonathan Majors’ full interview with IndieWire’s Screen Talk above.
