Madame Web was released in theaters on Feb. 14. The movie was made as a part of Sony’s Spider-Man cinematic universe, and the filmmakers decided to make creative changes to the character. In the comics, Madame Web is an elderly woman who mentors Spider-Man on his journeys, but in this film, they give her a younger appearance and have her lead a team of Spider-Women. Despite these changes, this film suffered the same fate as other Sony superhero films and was underwhelming. On a budget of $80 million, it only made $49.1 million. Madame Web failed to surprise audiences with its poor acting, confusing plot and lack of Spider-Man references.
The film is centered around Cassandra Webb (played by Dakota Johnson), a metropolis paramedic. She starts to show signs of seeing people’s future and what outcome it will have on them. During one of the visions, she notices that she has to protect the lives of three women: Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced). She has to save them and New York from Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who wants to eliminate them before they become Spider-Women.
From the beginning, this film was doomed to fail since it received little to no advertisement, besides the released trailers. Madame Web is a character that is not well known outside of the Spider-Man fandom, so it should have been a priority to inform the public about who she is and why it’s worth it to watch the movie. What publicity there was for the film was not helpful. The press tour to advertise this movie backfired as Dakota Johnson mostly talked negatively about the film production and admitted to knowing little about superhero movies
What sticks out like a sore thumb is the acting. It is very hard to take scenes seriously, such as scenes where Madame Web is giving the group a pep talk. Dakota Johnson looks like she would rather be doing something else. Even acting from Tahar Rahim felt rather forced and unnatural; however, credit should be given to Sydney Sweeney, despite her character being flat, she gave a good performance and could have benefited from more impactful scenes.
The age discrepancy between the film version Madame Web and the comic book original is not the only deviation worth noting. In fact, the character did not match the comic book or past interpretations of the character at all. In Spider-Man: The Animated Series (1994), Madame Web is presented as someone mysterious and a leader who wants to help Spider-Man but allows him to learn. She even went as far as reuniting Spider-Man with Spider-Men from different universes to give him a hand. This film is not even close to matching that past interpretation and instead of being a leader, she seems selfish and goofy at the same time. Part of this issue also has to do with the fact that Dakota Johnson was severely miscast for this role.
The film is an insult to Spider-Man and the fan base the reveres the character. We see a younger version of Mary Parker who is pregnant with Peter Parker and Ben Parker, who is Peter’s uncle. Uncle Ben’s iconic line “With great power comes great responsibility” was replaced with “When you take on responsibility, great power will come.” Not only does it sound odd, but it disrespects Spider-Man (2002), the movie that introduced the original line delivered by Cliff Robertson. Though it’s hard to tell during one of the scenes, it becomes apparent that they reused a swing scene from Spider-Man 2, which was released in 2004. This was weird, and it demonstrated the production team’s carelessness and laziness.
Something very confusing is that this movie takes place in the Spider-Man universe even though they never mention the character at all. It’s almost as if they are scared to say Peter Parker’s name. The rumor is that originally Andrew Garfield was supposed to be the Spider-Man of this universe, but later decided it should instead be Tom Holland since he is the most recent actor for Spider-Man. In the end, both ideas were scrapped, since it did not make sense to have either one of those versions since they were going for an early 2000s atmosphere.
It’s such a shame that Sony does not know how to create a proper Spider-Man universe, and instead just makes superhero movies that make zero sense. Understandably, they want to keep the rights to the Spider-Man character, but what is the point of that if they don’t create good content for such a popular character? To prevent movies like this from being released, they should map out a movie timeline and figure out what characters should be presented and how to demonstrate them in the correct light.
