Madame Web, the new… superhero movie starring Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney seems like it should have been a smash hit: hot stars, a new superhero story, a big Hollywood budget… but instead it’s turned out to be a total mess. It’s not the worst movie ever, like some are suggesting, but it definitely falls flat in a lot of ways and leaves us with more questions than answers. What was this film actually supposed to be? How did it manage to miss pretty much every mark? Why was even the marketing really weird?

“I don’t understand what’s happening.”

Let’s dive into all of those questions and more to figure out what really went wrong with Madame Webb, and take a look at the one big problem that really caught the film in a web of failure. (Plus, we’ll unpack what this movie’s flop means for superhero films in general – it’s probably not what you think!)

MADAME WEB

Before we dig into the film, let’s take a quick look at who Madame Web actually is. Since her first appearance in the Spider-Man comics in 1980 she’s appeared in a few different variations depending on the storyline, but generally Madame Web is a paralyzed older mutant with clairvoyant and telepathic abilities who lives her life connected to a web-shaped life support system. She generally shows up to use her psychic abilities to help Spider-Man solve crimes, and often acts as a mentor to the young superhero. So Sony’s choice to take this well known character and turn her into a young, non-yet-clairvoyant woman in a film that contractually cannot directly mention Spider-Man or Peter Parker by name was definitely an interesting choice… but it is supposed to be an origin story, after all.

“Let’s try that again.”

In the film, Cassie Webb is a young, everyday woman working as an EMT and simmering with resentment of her deceased mother. After temporarily dying in an accident, when she’s brought back to life, Cassie realizes that she’s begun having visions of things to come. Comic Madame Web uses her multitude of abilities to help various Spider characters save the day, but this film version, as writer John Paul Brammer hilariously put it, just “has sporadic visions of the future, which allow her to change fate. Mostly, she is a normal woman who hits people with her car.”

An origin story for Madame Web could have been interesting – when we meet her in the comics she’s already an older woman, so there is her entire life up to that point to explore. But, unfortunately, the film got wrapped up in a web of problems from which it just couldn’t free itself…

CH 2: THE PROBLEM

In the seemingly endless sea of superhero films, that mostly seem to be about the same superheroes and their same origin stories over and over and over, it was actually exciting to hear that we’d be getting an origin story for a character we haven’t yet seen in a live-action film. And while Madame Web is a new character for the big screen, she’s still connected to one of the most well known superhero properties, so doesn’t have to totally worry about the hurdle of lack of name recognition. And the movie stars two of the biggest actresses of the moment. So… what went wrong?

All of the major problems with this film seem to orbit the main, larger issue that… no one involved seems to have really cared about this film at all. The writing is not great – and not just the Marvel/Whedon-speak that has infected nearly every super film, but also just fumbling the basics like plotting and character development. It’s set in 2003 (for reasons no one is 100% sure about) and unironically and uncritically leans into tropes of that era – like ‘hot girl puts on glasses and now she’s a nerd that no one likes’. The film does occasionally lean into the more shlocky aspects of superhero films of that era, which are the best parts and almost help the film fall into so-bad-its-good territory. But mostly it just seems like everyone involved was phoning it in – sometimes literally, given the number of ADR-ed lines throughout the film. Even the promo was pretty lackluster from the studio side, pretty much exclusively placing the marketing of the films on the shoulders of Johnson and Sweeney. And because they are engaging and interesting women, their interviews have been fun and created some viral moments – but none of it made the film itself seem like a must see, it just made us want to watch more of their interviews. And, hilariously, the film’s biggest viral moment was… people joking about how much Johnson was phoning it in in the trailer.

“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”

(A line which didn’t even actually end up being in the film.)

Cassie is meant to feel like a relatable, everyday woman who just happens to become a superhero, but because she never really gets to be that powerful (and the other superheroes in the film don’t even actually get their powers yet) the film just doesn’t really feel that super. In the same way the recent Mean Girls remake fell flat because it missed the central aspect of the original, girls being mean, Madame Web is a superhero movie that isn’t very super or heroic. The film also just seems confused about what it is supposed to be. It almost feels like it wants to go in a thriller-type direction, but then doesn’t trust the audience enough to let us sit in a bit of mystery, and so explains everything flat out (often multiple times) so we always know what’s coming. There were also a lot of odd changes made from the comics for some reason, from the source of Madame Web’s powers to Ezekiel’s self-centeredness being ramped up to the point of him becoming a murderous villain in an attempt to save himself from a vision he has of the future. The film also serves as an almost-origin story for three Spider-Women: Julia, Mattie, and Anya, but they don’t actually yet become Spider-Women in this film – that was probably supposed to happen in a sequel, so… we’ll probably never get to see it. (Also Jessica Drew doesn’t appear at all.)

Okay, so if no one involved seems to really have been into this film… why does it exist?

SUPERHERO FATIGUE…?

Money! (Surprise!) Not necessarily from the box office, though they surely would have loved that, but from keeping control of the intellectual property. And since Sony doesn’t currently have the rights to major money maker Spider-Man, they hoped to at least pull in some eyes with the tangential connection to the webslinger. Because none of the drive behind this film seems to lie in ‘interest in the character’ or ‘a love for superhero movies’ or anything like that, but solely cold, hard studio economics, it’s no surprise that the film itself feels pretty empty.

There’s been a continual conversation in recent years about superhero fatigue from audiences – after a decade of being bombarded with superhero movies, people are kind of just burned out – but it seems like that’s now even hitting the studio side of things. But instead of pivoting to something else and giving all of this money to filmmakers with engaging ideas and an actual interest in film, they still want to be able to just slap a known (or known-ish) name onto a middling film and rake in the dough with minimal effort. Interest in these kinds of film has been waning for a while now (though not for the reasons everyone seems to assume, which we’ll talk about in a sec), but studios just haven’t quite made the decision to switch gears and so continue pumping out these kinds of films hoping one of them just happens to hit the jackpot. ‘So bad it’s good’ movies can be a lot of fun, but this genre in particular has a problem with spending so much money on films that they clearly don’t care about or even seem to think are going to do that well. So why not just spend that money on actual good, well made movies instead?

Sure, doing the same thing over and over isn’t working, so… what’s next?

THE FUTURE

When thinking about the future of superhero films, and film in general, one important thing to note is that the superheroes themselves aren’t really the problem. Because this type of film has become so synonymous with this larger issue of Hollywood phoning in moviemaking, it can be easy to just jump to the conclusion that people just don’t like superheroes anymore. But that’s not really the case – superheroes (and mutants) have been beloved parts of pop culture decades and decades. The problem isn’t the concept, it’s the execution. There are so many supers and mutants with incredibly interesting stories that have never gotten the chance to have the live-action treatment because Hollywood has gotten stuck in a rut where it has decided that a very small handful of them are safe, well performing characters and are too afraid to branch out and try anything else. So often the only time we do get to see any other characters are movies like Madame Web where the choice to put her on screen was a cynical financial move, not a creative one. The recent superhero films that have done well and become beloved are the ones that are unafraid to get creative and jump a little out of the box and try something new. There’s also a whole conversation to be had about how animation is seen as ‘less than’ live-action film, and so even though many of these stories would be better served by the freedom that comes with animation, studios are often still dead set on forcing everything to be poorly lit, didn’t-have-enough-time-to-finish-the-CGI live action, but that’d be a whole separate video. Hopefully when looking at recent successes and failures, instead of finding easy, incorrect places to place blame (‘people don’t like women superheroes’, ‘only 3 superheroes make money we just have to keep making their origin stories over and over again’, etc.) studios will start to really take stock of what worked, what didn’t, and why people seem to be so burnt out on this genre of film – and then actually course correct.

Only time will tell if the next set of live action superhero films are going to go in a new direction or just be more of the same as studio bosses look to point the finger at everyone but themselves. But we certainly hope the recent string of flops leads to a change, and we get to see some new faces have their moment in the spotlight. Let us in the comments: which superhero or mutant would you most like to see get their own major movie? And would you rather it be live-action or animated?