Marvel Tweaks Their Superhero Film Formula With Ant-Man

An anonymous reader writes: Over the past decade, Marvel has been rolling out superhero film after superhero film. They've found a successful formula, and each of the last half-dozen films has brought in over a half-billion dollars in ticket revenue. Today they added to the franchise with Ant-Man, based on a superhero who can shrink himself to the size of an ant (while maintaining normal strength), and control insects. But where the spate of Avengers-related movies only occasionally interjected humor into their world-preserving plots, Ant-Man focuses more on being funny and simply entertaining. Reviews are generally positive, but not overwhelmingly so — Rotten Tomatoes has it at 79%, with a 91% audience score while Metacritic has it at 64/100, with an 8.4/10 user score. The LA Times calls it "playful." Vox has good and bad to say about Ant-Man, but notes that its failings are very common to Marvel's other films. Salon says, "...in its medium-stupid and mismanaged fashion it's not so awful." Wired posted the obligatory physics of Ant-Man article, as did FiveThirtyEight.

Comments

Bar is low

[Anonymous Coward]

The latest Avenger lowered the bar enough for Ant-Man. Thankfully, I was able at the time to rinse Avengers off a few days later with Mad Max.

This isn't tech. This isn't stuff that matters.

[Anonymous Coward]

What the hell happened to this site?

Re:This isn't tech. This isn't stuff that matters.

[Pfhorrest]

Comic book movies are about as nerdy as it gets, so this definitely qualifies as "news for nerds".

Can we stop giving a damn about non-user scores?

[Shadow of Eternity]

How many times have we seen this with everything from Ant-Man to the same issue in the other direction with Far Cry 2? "Critics" hate something because it doesn't pander to their agenda while people love it, or they fall over each other fellating it because it does pander to their agenda or they got paid while actual consumers despise it because it's crap.