Welcome to Marvel Phase 5 everybody:
Just got out of Ant-Man. Solid 7/10. Jonathan Majors is going to be a lot of fun to watch.
Looks neat, although I’m disappointed in having no Shang-Chi sequel. Despite it having the typical Marvel third act, the first was a fun superhero flick that didn’t try to be everything, and Simu Liu and Awkwafina were a fun comedy duo. Maybe it’s in the cards for phase 6?
My understanding is that they’d like to do another one before Secret Wars, although I also read that they want to fast-track another Dr. Strange in there too so who’s to say what survives. I’m still upset that the third act wasn’t just a magic-free knock-down drag-out punch-up between Shang-Chi and Wenwu.
There’s confirmation of a sequel already, but it’s actually not going to be part of this saga at all. It’s going to be phase 7, along with the Armor Wars movie. Lol. yeah.
Watched Ant-Man: Quantumania with a friend. Paul Rudd is still the only person in the MCU who is funny enough to carry the jokes this universe thrives on, so the Ant-Man films are always entertaining. I liked Jonathan Majors in this much more than I liked him in Loki, gave me hope for him as a recurring villain for this phase. Not much to say about the rest of the stuff, I think ‘the quantum universe is just a planet you might see in GOTG’ is a little dull, but the Star Wars meets slugs aesthetic was still done well. Most of the side characters weren’t very interesting, but I did love the communist ants. And the infinite recursion of Scotts was a cooler concept for an action scene than basically anything in Phase 4.
Yeah, I think the secret sauce to the Ant-Man movies is that Paul Rudd is just playing Paul Rudd But Superhero and that works fine. My meta-concern with Quantumania is that this seems to be where the bar for the MCU has settled: a solid 7/10 that you can probably wait to see on Disney+. They don’t seem to have any gas in the tank for something like a Black Panther anymore. But Jonathan Majors seems like he’s having a great time in his James Spader period
