Marvel's smallest franchise is having a big opening weekend.
Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania took in $104 million over three days at the domestic box office, the largest opening for the Ant-Man series. This easily surpassed the $75 million debut of 2018's Ant-Man and the Wasp and the $57 million opening of 2015's Ant-Man. It was, however, lower than Marvel's most recent few box office debuts, including Black Panther: Wakanda Forever's $181 million, Thor: Love and Thunder's $144 million, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness' $187 million.
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But Marvel has hit one big stumbling block in this road map, as Quantumania received a surprisingly mixed reception from both critics and audiences. The film became only the second MCU movie to earn a "rotten" rating on Rotten Tomatoes, and audiences polled by CinemaScore gave it a B, the lowest grade an MCU film has ever received. Of the studio's 31 movies, just five have earned a CinemaScore grade lower than an A-, and four of those were released in the last two years.
This suggests there's a serious risk that audiences will not be as invested in this new era of Marvel movies as they were leading up to Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame, which could make it difficult for the next Avengers films to reach the same box office heights as their predecessors. But The Kang Dynasty and Secret Wars are a few years, and many more Marvel movies, away, so the studio still has plenty of room to grow.
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