Image: Marvel Studios
Come next week, Ant-Man & the Wasp: Quantumania will be out in theaters and presumably bring the adventures of Paul Rudd’s Scott Lang to some kind of close, at least until those Avengers sequels in two years.
There’ve been a lot of sub-franchises within the MCU, but Ant-Man’s always been one of the weirder ones to talk about. Back in 2015 when the original movie came out, there was concern about it when widely liked filmmaker Edgar Wright departed over creative difference and replaced with Peyton Reed. And even ignoring that, the movie served as a good punching bag at the time since the MCU was also in the midst of a diversity problem that wasn’t solved until three or four years later.
Suffice to say, if there were any early MCU movie that could’ve been a dud, it would’ve been this one. But the original Ant-Man is something of an underrated classic—as much as it could be when it was also setting up Scott’s appearance in Captain America: Civil War—and its sequel Ant-Man & the Wasp is also pretty good in its own right. You can call almost any MCU movie is a reliably fun watch, and nowhere is this more true than with director Peyton Reed’s run of films. They’ve had some great casting choices, and they have no problem letting themselves be for a general family audience.
It doesn’t entirely feel like the Ant-Man franchise gets its due. And there’s other parts of the MCU pantheon that exist in a similar space: because Marvel is content with blasting a firehose of MCU shows and films at audiences until they lose oxygen, it can be easy to overlook the little gems that do their job pretty well. For this weekend’s Open Channel, we want to know what MCU films or shows you would consider to be underrated, or at the very least overlooked.
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