Disney is now a massive juggernaut with an uncountable number of intellectual properties at its disposal, and despite recent losses, the future appears bright. With properties like Marvel and Star Wars, the studio has reaped large dividends in the last decade or so. But not every cog in this massive machine is working as well as it should. Many of the company’s Marvel shows and movies, which fall under the umbrella of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, have suffered in quality following the conclusion of Avengers: Endgame in 2019. The latest entry, Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, was supposed to be this important and yet light-hearted introduction to the next Big Bad of MCU, called Kang the Conqueror, played by Jonathan Majors, and yet the film did not please most critics.
Long hours, low pay, a lack of job security, and poor working conditions have long been complaints among VFX artists in Hollywood
The film’s CGI quality was one of the major points of contention among critics. According to Vulture, the bad CGI and VFX in the film may have been due to the focus being on Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. At the same time, both films were in development and post-production. And it appears that the VFX artists on Quantumania were not given the same resources as those on Wakanda Forever.
Long hours, low pay, a lack of job security, and poor working conditions have long been complaints among VFX artists in Hollywood. To meet tight deadlines, they are frequently required to work overtime and on weekends, and the intense pressure to deliver high-quality work can lead to burnout and mental health issues. Many VFX artists have also expressed dissatisfaction with the lack of recognition they receive for their contributions to blockbuster films, which frequently bring in billions of dollars.
“It felt like the higher-up and supervisor roles were shifted around to put that on their plates and there was a smaller team working on Ant-Man”
One VFX technician told the publication, “A lot of us are sitting here thinking, The money is there. Why is it not coming down? Marvel spending a bit more money to pay more VFX people wouldn’t make that much of a difference for the executives all the way at the top. But if it comes down to them not being comfortable with their bank numbers and us working until burnout, we lose out every time. Honestly, I equate it to human greed.”
One other said, “Wakanda Forever took precedence. It felt like the higher-up and supervisor roles were shifted around to put that on their plates and there was a smaller team working on Ant-Man. It was on the back burner — less of a pressing thing. Maybe the director had an idea of what he wanted, but he wasn’t 100 per cent clear. We had a rough environment in that we were sticking a few main characters. At that time, we weren’t told where the characters should be in that environment. We were just going with what felt right. Then there were times when we were creating an actor’s entire action: Ant-Man moving across something. And you just think, Why didn’t they film it the right way or how they wanted it in the first place? Why are we having to redo and re-create? Why do we have to Frankenstein together with an actor’s performance? A quick shot that maybe takes two seconds would have to be redone 20 times to get the look that they want. There was a lot of reworking and a lot of inefficiencies. I ended up taking over and reworking a large portion of other artists’ work — which is not how things usually go when you are working for other studios.”
Some VFX artists have organized in recent years to demand better working conditions and unionization, which they believe will give them greater bargaining power and leverage in negotiations with studios. Quantumania continues the story of Scott Lang, aka Ant-Man, as played by Paul Rudd. Lang, his daughter Cassie Lang (Kathryn Newton), Hope van Dyne (Evangeline Lilly), Janet van Dyne (Michelle Pfeiffer), and Hank Pym (Michael Douglas) are stranded in the Quantum Realm in the film, which also stars director Peyton Reed. And there they come face to face with Kang the Conqueror.
“Quantumania is an absolute dud”
As mentioned above, most critics have dismissed the film. It currently holds a score of 49 percent on the review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. The critical consensus reads, “Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania mostly lacks the spark of fun that elevated earlier adventures, but Jonathan Majors’ Kang is a thrilling villain poised to alter the course of the MCU.”
WION also gave the film a negative review. It read, “Quantumania is an absolute dud. I felt bad for genuinely great actors that populate this thing for having to mouth lines that might as well have come out from that AI thing everyone these days seems so fond of. The script is, and I cannot stress this enough, execrable. The screenwriter behind this film is Jeff Loveness and that should frighten you. For he is also writing the next Avengers movie, The Kang Dynasty. MCU is certainly not getting any better soon.” Having said that, at the time of writing, this film is performing exceptionally well at the global box office.
