Recently, I was probably one of the few people who went out and watched Sony’s latest Marvel movie, Madame Web, and I completely understand the poor reviews and ratings. While I was a huge fan of Marvel productions a couple of years ago, I started to get fatigued and lose interest. Madame Web is actually the first Marvel film that I’ve watched in theaters since Ant-Man and the Wasp.
When I saw how badly this movie was doing, I just knew I had to see it. While I love watching good movies, I also love watching bad ones. And let me say, this is definitely a bad movie.
There was one scene towards the end, during the standard superhero final fight/chase scene, where Cassandra Webb, played by Dakota Johnson, and her crew of teenage girls, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O’Connor, are fleeing the scene in a stolen ambulance. In a quick cut, you can see that in post-production the movie’s editors just completely forgot to edit the background in, and out the window is just a blue screen. I couldn’t contain my laughter in the theater, and normally I would hate making noise in the movies, but no one was there.
It’s not just the extremely online social media users discussing the absolute failure of Madame Web. The actors themselves are too.
Throughout the Madame Web press tour, Johnson made jokes, acknowledging that she didn’t like the movie. In an interview with Bustle they wrote, “[Johnson’s] already predicting the potential aftermath of today’s conversation. ‘Like, ‘Dakota Johnson Breaks Her Silence On Madame Web’s F*cking Box Office Failure,’’ she says, laughing. ‘It’s like, ‘No, I’m not breaking any silence. I’m just talking.’”
It’s not just Johnson. Sydney Sweeney recently hosted Saturday Night Live, and compared her recent movies, Madame Web and Anyone but You, in her monologue, saying, “you might have seen me in Anyone but You or Euphoria. You definitely did not see me in Madame Web.”
With the main leads of the movie discussing just how bad the movie is and how poor it’s performing, how on Earth did this movie get the green light for production?
Firstly, Sony Pictures owns the rights to Spider-Man movies and all of the characters within the Spider-Man universe. Sony will keep making these lackluster Spider-Man adaptations as long as they have the rights to those characters, regardless of how badly they perform.
“Sony fought very hard to keep the MCU from taking sole rights to [Spider-Man], and they have to keep using the pieces they have, or they risk a competitor dominating even more content. With that in mind, it doesn’t ultimately matter how ill-advised, poorly executed, or even financially unsuccessful each entry is. They’re going to keep coming,” writes Joshua Kristian McCoy for Gamerant.
Secondly, the mess that was Morbius in 2022 has possibly led the studio to have a different take on marketing for Madame Web.
Shortly after Morbius was released into theaters, it quickly faced backlash for being a “Vampire Superhero Film That Sucks More Than Just Blood.” The movie was so bad that it actually became a viral meme online, which led to the movie becoming popular.
“Morbius Sweep,” “It’s Morbin’ Time,” “Mor-billion,” and so on are just some examples of memes that swept the internet back in 2022 when Morbius was released. These memes caused Morbius to become such an internet sensation that it led Sony to believe that the movie would be even more successful if they re-released it in theaters.
Spoiler: It did not cause a mad rush into theaters like Sony had envisioned.
Now that we have the ability to look back on Morbius, the movie was able to almost break even at the box office without taking into consideration any profits made from selling it on digital or streaming platforms. With the movie’s budget being around $75 million, they needed to make around $187 million to earn their money back. After the re-releases, it made about $167 million.
Recently, movies with “meme-ability” have become a crucial and powerful advertising tactic. Morbius is just one example that Sony has had direct experience with. “Barbenheimer” over the summer led to both movies becoming smash hits, with Barbie making $1.4 billion and Oppenheimer making $950 million.
With Madame Web, many believe Sony was likely looking to have the same “success” strategy with the movie as they did with Morbius— becoming a meme.
While the movie was an internet meme for a bit, like the famous “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” from the trailer, that didn’t make it into the movie. The jokes have now faded, and it has truly just become the butt of the joke. With Madame Web having a 12% on Rotten Tomatoes and only making around $90 million in the box office (it needs around $200 million to make a profit), it’s safe to say that Sony’s “meme” strategy has not worked.
Unfortunately for Sony, neither Madame Web nor Morbius was good enough to be liked by the public to make the profit they needed. Nor bad enough to become liked by a niche community and become a cult classic. This strategy of making a movie “meme-able” could be the scary future of not just superhero movies but also future big-budget films. While I hope this is just the case for these movies, it’s slowly becoming a reality.