Blockbuster summer movies are by-the-numbers formula-driven affairs. But watch Madame Web, and you wonder if that’s true. Because if there’s a formula for making these movies, why is Web so terrible?
Sony’s trying to make a Spider-Man Universe happen, building a movie franchise out of supporting characters from the Spider-Man comics without that wall-crawler ever appearing himself. Spider-Man minus Spider-Man. Thus Madame Web, introduced in the comics as a blind precognitive senior citizen in a life-supporting wheelchair whose backing plugs and pipes resemble a large spider-web.
The first problem: this is a support character, who typically gives Spider-Man hints and missions, not herself a super-hero. The movie’s a period piece about her origin, but precognition is simply not a visually spectacular action-oriented power in the way that flight or super-strength are.
There are hints that the movie understands this, and is trying to build a horror atmosphere. The psychic gifts of lead character Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) are often disorienting for the audience, nested in unmarked flashforwards, but for the most part the visions are pointlessly confusing.
Extraordinarily clunky dialogue, often badly redubbed, leaves the actors lost, wrestling with awkward and nonsensical exposition. Potentially charismatic performers struggle to play out a plot that makes no sense. Adam Scott as Webb’s co-worker Ben Parker fares best, as the role calls for him to be sympathetic but confused; the audience relates.
The overall story involves a character named Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), for some reason kitted out in a Spider-Man costume with the black and red colors reversed, setting out to kill three teens he believes will grow up to kill him. Webb’s involvement is tangential and coincidental, but then the whole story’s held together by a thick spackle of coincidence. There’s a lack of big action set-pieces, and no tension or creepiness to compensate. The costumes of the future spider-women are poor, and even the special effects are a mix of obvious and dull.
What was Sony thinking? Their plan to monetize some IP that happens to be under their corporate control is bizarre. Trying to build a movie franchise around a character without making movies about that character is peculiar. Adding multiversal shenanigans (as in 2021's Venom sequel) and confusion about the timeline (Madame Web is largely set in 2004, with a subplot about the birth of Peter Parker) doesn’t make things better.
Worse, this attempt at a Spider-Man Universe comes after Sony’s previous attempt at building a franchise around actual Spider-Man movies failed. Marc Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man and Amazing Spider-Man 2, starring Andrew Garfield, did poorly enough Sony eventually struck a deal with Disney to make Spider-Man films for them, incorporating the character into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. But despite seeing close up how the MCU works, Sony’s Spider-Man spinoffs have been a mixed bag at best.
Two Venom movies, featuring one of Spidey’s recurring adversaries, have been moderate hits. They’re bad, but they’re the kind of bad movies that aim low accordingly, giving some interesting actors (Tom Hardy, Woody Harrelson in the second one) the chance to chew scenery. A third film’s coming up in October.
But 2022’s Morbius was dead on arrival. Another villain-centered film, it became fodder for memes without anybody bothering to watch it. A wise choice by the meme-makers; there’s a semi-decent first half-hour that retells the character’s origin from the comics, and then the movie falls off a cliff into cataclysmic stupidity.
Madame Web followed. The first movie directed by S.J. Clarkson, it was written by Clarkson and Claire Parker, along with work from Morbius scribes Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless. As with Morbius, it birthed memes mocking the film, in this case deriving from an awkward line in the trailer (eventually cut from the finished film). And, like Morbius, it failed to make money.
The future of Sony’s attempted franchise has to be in jeopardy. The animated Spider-Verse movies have done well, but a “suite” of projected TV shows to air on Amazon have yet to materialize and it seems only one, the Nicolas Cage vehicle Spider-Noir, is currently being made. After the third Venom movie, only Kraven the Hunter, scheduled for December, has a release date. Beyond that, a lot of ideas for movies have been floated over time; it’s unclear what’ll actually get made.
There’s a theory that Sony’s making these films because they’re legally obligated to begin production on a live-action Spider-Man movie every few years or lose the rights to the character (the last Spider-Man solo film came out in 2021). But it appears they haven’t got a figure equivalent to Kevin Feige at Disney, overseeing the series as a whole and coordinating stories. It isn’t even clear which of the three live-action big-screen Spideys of the past couple of decades they’re building toward featuring in their movies, or whether they intend to introduce a new one.
Aimless, rudderless, and captain-less, these movies would have the odds against them even if everything else broke right; they exist only to set up other movies. But it’s worse than that. Because, some moments in the Venom films aside, they’re not even good pop cinema.
And so Madame Web failed as a cog in Sony’s franchise schemes, and it failed as a summer movie. Perhaps in that failure there’s something uplifting. It’s pleasing to think that movies made by algorithms and formulas can fail. A film as terrible as Madame Web shows that formulas alone aren’t enough; you have to know how to apply them. If not art, craft at least is still important. So far Sony hasn’t grasped that.