BYU students discuss release of new Marvel movie

With the release of “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” on Feb. 17, some students have said they are disappointed in the recent releases of the Marvel franchise and will not be seeing the new Ant-Man movie in theaters.

“Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania” has the lowest Rotten Tomato score a Marvel movie has seen yet, at 47%. At its domestic opening, the movie made $106,109,650. The second week it was in theaters, it made 69.9% less, at $31,964,803. In its third week in theaters, it did 61% worse than the previous week, at $12,471,000.

“I really hated the most recent Dr. Strange movie,” Anne Romney, a junior at BYU, said. “It was more like a horror movie than a fun action movie … so I don’t want to see more of them.”

While Romney said she chose not to see the newest Ant-Man movie because of a distaste for the most recent Dr. Strange movie, others, like BYU student Carter Eden, said they chose not to watch because they have grown tired of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

“I just don’t care about seeing it,” Eden said. “There are pieces of media that I would rather invest my time in than the Marvel Cinematic Universe at this point.”

Eden, along with media arts major Tyler Bevans, said he believes Marvel has lost the storytelling that it had in previous years. He said he believes the franchise has not produced a high-quality story since “Avengers: Endgame” was released in 2019. Eden said a main contributor to the directionless feeling he sees in the movies is due to poor character development.

“They are taking a lot of characters that could have interesting stories, but they are giving them the same story every time,” Eden said. “They are not pushing things to a new era of Marvel; they are just trying to rekindle the greatest hits of phase three and phase four.”

The Marvel Cinematic Universe has used “phases” to describe different eras and time periods of the released movies. Phase one of Marvel movies were released from 2008-2012, and included “Iron Man,” “Incredible Hulk,” “Iron Man 2,” “Thor,” “Captain America: The First Avenger” and “The Avengers.” The second phase included Marvel movies released from 2013-2015 such as “Thor: The Dark World,” “Guardians of the Galaxy” and “Avengers: Age of Ultron.” Eden said he believes that after phase three, which took place from 2016-2019, many of the storylines and character arcs began to be repeated.

“To see all the Marvel movies start to congeal into one giant media mass is just not fun to watch,” Eden said.

Eden said he believes that part of the downfall of the Marvel franchise has been in the creation of television shows such as “Loki,” “Wanda Vision” and “Moon Knight.” He said he feels the shows created and streamed on Disney Plus have appeared as a way to make money, not further develop the plot or characters in any significant way. The plots of some shows, such as “Wanda Vision,” have influenced plots in Marvel movies, such as “Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

“I feel like most people haven’t watched the shows, so it makes it hard that they can’t enjoy the movies without watching the shows,” Romney said.

While Bevans is also not fond of many of the TV shows produced by Marvel, he says that some of them, particularly “Loki,” were not bad. In particular, Bevans said he believes that “Loki” was able to give more depth to a character than he said he believes many viewers were interested in.