Another swing and a miss from Sony.
It’s becoming almost laughable to walk into these Sony-built Spiderverse films when Sony clearly has no idea what they’re doing, other than just creating a random movie that loosely ties to Spider-Man. There is much to say about the film, but unfortunately, not much is positive. Hopefully, not too many fell into the trap of taking their sweethearts to see this movie on Valentine’s Day. Before getting into some of the details of the movie’s struggles, take a listen to our reactions episode, where you can get the raw reactions of what we truly thought of Madame Web.
And You Thought This Was a Superhero Movie
The genuine worst part of this film was Sony’s aggressive marketing of the three Spider-women in the trailers, just for the movie to be the most non-superhero movie ever made. And again, this comes down to how Sony marketed it. If you think you’re going to the movies to see some cool origins, the only one you actually see is Madame Web, which while fitting to the movie title, isn’t what any of the marketing pieces lead you to believe. Not a single one of the Spider-women actually receives their powers in the movie, and the real kicker is that every scene from the trailers of them suited up is quite honestly it. These scenes are all meant to be in the ‘future’ when they come to kill Ezekiel, yet you don’t know that going into the movie.
Now, Dakota Johnson has been fighting for her life during this press tour, but one of her comments actually is probably one of the most important things to know before going to see it, if you still choose to. She said something along the lines of ‘this isn’t a superhero movie, it’s more of a psychological thriller’ and I do heavily believe if I had seen that before seeing the movie, my perception might have greatly changed while watching it. However, Sony didn’t quite get that memo, so if you’re looking for a superhero movie over here, don’t even bother.
Madame Web Connects Everyone, Right?
The hardest pill to swallow comes from the fact that once again, Sony has made a random movie, with a rather obscure character that now connects to quite literally nothing. Going into the movie, Taylor and I actually did have some pretty high hopes that Sony had a plan here. Madame Web was going to be the final piece of the puzzle, helping to connect all the other random Sony-verse movies made. Maybe we should be consulting for Sony because while we were wrong, it would have helped this film along, and the entire Sony-verse. Instead, this movie lives entirely on its own, and they do so by making it set in 2003, where now these characters would be solidly at least in their 30s in the present day. Maybe that could work if there’s a second one done in the future, which we’ll touch on in one second.
On the flip side of the coin is that if there is never again a follow-up to this movie, making it a random stand-alone set pre-Spider-Man and pre-Sonyverse characters just makes things awfully confusing. We saw Peter Parker born, even if he was never actually named, which means technically speaking there will be a Spider-Man eventually in this universe. That being said, how do you have a random spider-like man running the streets in 2003, foreshadow three Spider-women who are meant to get their powers before Peter Parker comes of age to get his, and then still have a Peter Parker Spider-Man?
Regardless of the questions about the universe and Sony-verse as a whole, the bigger issue is that by choosing to not make this connect to anything else that Sony has put out, we once again are left trying to figure out what Sony is creating, if anything at this point.
The Villain was Certainly There
Nothing can kill a movie quicker than having the world’s worst-written villain. Think the Dark Elves of Thor: The Dark World if you need a reference. Unfortunately for this movie, to add to the list of its sins, Ezekiel was arguably one of the worst villains ever put on a big screen. Most of this is due to the writing of his character, which left him one note the entire time. To summarize, he doesn’t want the three Spider-women to kill him in the future so he is going to kill them first. That is about all you need to know and all you really get to know about Ezekiel Sims. The audience is never given more reason as to why he doesn’t want to die, why it is so important to him, and what he has been doing all these years. We don’t even learn at the beginning of the movie why he wants the spider that Cassie’s mom is looking for so badly. Is it for power? Is it for personal reasons? There is little fleshed out about the character which just leads to an almost embarrassing showing.
The other half of the villain issue was that Sony did ADR (Automated Dialogue Replacement) with many of his lines. Used correctly, no one would notice, but it seems that the editing done, specifically with him, was just not right. It never quite seemed like what he was saying matched what his lips were mouthing, creating a jarring experience every time he was on the screen.
The Future of Madame Web
I mentioned we would discuss the possibility of a sequel to Madame Web earlier and the time has finally come. Sony seemed to be quite confident in the movie, as it appeared that the film set up a subsequent second film to come in the unknown future. The entire movie is pretty much a prequel, as mentioned, it is set in 2003. If Sony does plan to make Madame Web and her three Spider-women important in the current age of the Sony-verse and MCU, then we’ll need some form of a sequel to bring us there. Likely, the sequel will actually have to be about how Julia, Anya, and Mattie become Spider-women and therefore important to bigger stories, rather than just who they will be eventually. As of right now, we’ve essentially seen the equivalent of the Ancient One telling Strange he’ll be the Sorcerer Supreme when we see him in medical school.
However, a sequel all hinges on probably one main thing: the performance of the first movie. We’ve seen a few sequels made from fairly crappy first films, so it isn’t impossible. However, with Madame Web already tanking big time in the theaters and a leading lady who seems like she doesn’t want to be anywhere near the film itself or associated with it, it makes looking ahead at what might happen difficult.
Positives of the Movie
I will leave these reactions with at least two semi-positive pieces of feedback regarding Madame Web. The first is that I do give credit to Sony for taking on such a deep-cut character. While I’m not 100% sure why they chose Madame Web since they didn’t tie her into anything, it was still a fairly large endeavor. It especially was a big task considering her abilities in the comics are chalked up to her being a mutant. Sony had to hire a team that would completely redo her origin story, and while they didn’t exactly hit it out of the park, they still created something fairly comprehensive enough.
The other positive from the movie was the final few scenes, where Madam Web has become a more accurate comic book version of herself. I think that it was pretty cool how we could see her transformation in the film’s final moments into a much closer appearance to what we know her to look like. It was nice to have that connection. Additionally, them mentioning the disease that renders her disabled in the comics but how in this universe, her mother found a way to cure her, was also a nice touch, even if it was a bit of a stretch.
Image: “Madame Web”, Daisy Phillipson, Dexerto
Sisters Assembled 