Jonathan Majors isn't too concerned about those negative Ant-Man 3 reviews

Jonathan Majors isn't losing sleep over the poor reviews of Ant-Man 3.

The actor makes his big-screen Marvel debut as the menacing Kang the Conquerer in Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania. While the superhero flick was largely panned, critics have been more forgiving with Majors' standout performance. To the star, "it's all data" — and the negative reviews don't "change how I see myself, period."

"I'm a performance within a story," Majors said on IndieWire's Screen Talk podcast Friday. "One thing I will say to my team as we're leaving a premiere if they're reading reviews, I'll say, 'How's the movie doing?' I try to clean my plate and take care of my part. The response is: 'You're straight. You're good. They like you.' And they tell me about the movie. Sometimes the movie is also on that level, and sometimes [it's not]."

He added of film critics, "It's just people. They have an opinion. You always have an opinion. I'm no fool. I know these are people writing it. These aren't my Yale professors or my drama teachers. These are people who have kids and they have a perspective, they have a religious upbringing or a lack thereof. They live in this town, or they want to be seen in this way or don't want to be seen in this way."

Referencing the 47% critics score on Rotten Tomatoes, Majors continued, "I look at the aggregate and, okay, 47. But what does that 47 mean when you also got this amount of box office? What do these things mean? It's information. I am in the know. I won't play myself. If you are a critic on a level, I probably know you and understand your politics."

He noted how much filmmakers and actors often give themselves to projects that may pan. "I invested in these things. That's the other part, you know," Majors said. "The artists and the filmmakers that made these movies invested years, sometimes, into the two hours and 15 minutes you see. I'm not saying be nice, I'm just saying understand it's a real transaction that's happening when you put pen to paper, you know?"

The threequel starring Paul Rudd, Evangeline Lilly, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Michael Douglas debuted with a mighty $104 million at the domestic box office, but experienced a sharp decline (~70%) on week two with $32 million, a franchise-worst drop. Screenwriter Jeff Loveness recently told The Daily Beast that the negative reviews took him by surprise.

"I was in a pretty low spot," he said. "Those were not good reviews, and I was like, 'What the …?' I'm really proud of what I wrote for Jonathan and Michelle Pfeiffer. I thought that was good stuff, you know? And so I was just despondent, and I was really sad about it."

Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania is in theaters now.

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