Madame Web left fans having visceral, rather aggressive reactions. Marvel and Sony are no strangers to the “Spider Verse.” Spiderman has become one of the most referenced heroes ever in superhero movies. Think about how often Spiderman shows up in Marvel alone. Spiderman has been featured in six films, starring Tom Holland. There are also two other spidermen, Andrew Garfield and Toby Maguire, that have appeared in their own universes, in addition to Marvel. Then there is Miles Morales, another spiderman, with even more spidermen/spiderwomen within the movie. On top of that, there are spiderman villain movies like Venom 1 and 2, Kraven the hunter (coming soon), and now Madame Web.
As we know, every film cannot be a box office smash. And this movie definitely cannot be seen as one. That seems to be the trend when it comes to some of these new Marvel movies; they have been somewhat disappointing to the audience. Marvel and Sony seem to be intermittently flopping in recent years in their projects connected to Spiderman. Back in 2022, Sony/Marvel released Mobius, and it failed. The movie only reached a little under 74 million in the U.S. box office. The film also earned itself a 15% from critics but a 71% from audience, so not completely horrible. Marvel’s next biggest flop was The Marvels, which I thoroughly enjoyed. This movie gained 26.5 million in U.S. box office, which became Marvel’s lowest earning movie ever. Although the money didn’t show its success, it actually got surprisingly high ratings on Rotten Tomatoes.
This brings me to Madame Web. This movie has now stolen the mantle of being the lowest earning Marvel movie in history. Madame Web’s box office only earned 26.2 million, and also only gained a 13% critics rating and a 56% audience score.
To summarize, this movie follows Cassandra Webb, a New York City parametric who begins to show signs of clairvoyance. She has to then confront her past and figure out why she has these abilities. Through this, she gains a connection to three young girls who she’s been in contact with at some point in her life. The girls spend the movie trying to evade and beat the superpowered man trying to kill them. This movie has a vibe of a superpowered Groundhog Day or even Edge of Tomorrow. I believe the movie to be interesting and immersive to the point you’re even stressed for the characters. All and all, I had a good time.
There were however many oversights in the film’s production. One interesting fact being that it is one of the most edited films in history supposedly, beating out Mad Max. There was one detail that bothered me more than the others and that was the fact that one of the actors, Tahar Rahim, who played Ezekiel Simms seemed to be completely off the whole time in the way he spoke, the ADR (automated dialogue replacement) was super clunky. The editing of his mouth did not match the words coming out of it.
After reading multiple articles about people’s thoughts behind the movie, these thoughts range from people hating the acting and wishing it showed more comic book accurate details all the way to how Sydney Sweeney was too covered and there were too many girl characters.
My final opinion is that I believe this was a good movie. I don’t think it was the greatest Marvel/Sony movie to hit theaters of course, but this movie was suspenseful and it showcased actresses I like and showed them playing different kinds of roles. I suggest Madame Web to anyone who is willing to watch a superhero movie.
