Who Is Madame Web?

Madame Web

There is only one more week before Sony, in association with Marvel, drops their first movie of the year, Madame Web. Starring Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Emma Roberts, and Adam Scott, just to name a few of the big cast members, this movie is quite stacked for a sort of obscure comic book reference. In fact, Madame Web herself never actually headlines a comic book but instead plays as a more supporting character to quite a few notable Spider-people. For the time being, this fact leaves the new movie a mystery to many, although it’s still important to know a few important things about the character before entering theaters next week.

Madame Web, also known as Cassandra “Cassie” Webb, first appeared in the 80s when she helped Spider-Man locate a missing person. She is a mutant, which is likely one of those facts that should probably be held for reference later on. Her mutant abilities include clairvoyance, telepathy, and precognition, all of which she is born with. However, she is also paralyzed and blind, leaving her fairly homebound and later in harm’s way. Sony’s Madame Web, from what was seen in the trailers, clearly is neither paralyzed nor blind, and she also seems to gain her abilities later in life during an accident. As Sony doesn’t have the rights to the mutants, who are officially back under the Marvel banner, Sony likely worked to make a story that would give her these abilities while also successfully removing the mutant gene from Cassie. It’s a slight disappointment, as many wait with bated breath for more mutants to appear.

Moving past this mutant discussion, Madame Web is an interesting character because she becomes quite an important person after her initial interaction with Spider-Man. Word gets around of her abilities, and as mentioned above, this puts her in harm’s way, which is seen throughout a few different storylines, with one including Juggernaut. At one point, she becomes immortal and also rotates between a young and old appearance. There is quite a bit of storyline here, including House of M, but again, due to Sony’s inability to use the mutants and to therefore make Cassie a mutant in the movie, I’m skipping past it. What is important to pull out of this is that Cassie acts as a mentor to Mattie Franklin, one of the Spider-Women we see in Madame Web. She also passes her psychic abilities onto Julia Carpenter, another Spider-Woman in the movie, before she is ‘killed’. I put killed in quotes because she is resurrected by none other than Ben Reilly aka Scarlet Spider.

Now this is a super basic background on her character, but the most important aspect to know is that Cassie is connected to quite a few of the Spider-Man characters we already have on the board, prior to Madame Web. Obviously, excluding Spider-Man and the ones already mentioned, she interacts with Prowler, Jessica Drew, and Kraven the Hunter. For some more background on the character’s storylines, here are some other places to catch up on Madame Web’s history.

Sony’s Madame Web will likely be pretty far from the comic storyline, at least for now, yet it will be interesting to see how they create this unique character. Madame Web will be in theaters Valentine’s Day and our reactions episode to the movie will be out the following weekend.

Image: “Madame Web”, Erik Amaya, Rotten Tomatoes

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