Marvel fans with a Netflix subscription can rejoice next month, when one of the worst comic book movies of the decade is set to leave the streaming platform on November 14. What is this retina-burning abomination of a movie? If we tell you that it stars Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney, was a box office flop in 2024, and picked up several Golden Raspberry Awards, that may give it away that the movie in question is Madame Web.
Following in the footsteps of Morbius, Madame Web became another terrible Marvel offering from Sony, and one of the reasons Sony’s Spider-Man Universe movies have come to an end for the foreseeable future – something that Madame Web’s clairvoyant Cassandra Webb should have been able to see coming a mile off. Despite enlisting a seemingly strong cast, which, alongside Johnson and Sweeney, included Superman star Isabela Merced, Celeste O’Connor, Emma Roberts, and Adam Scott, the movie became just another heavily panned addition to Sony’s collection of Marvel offerings.
Madame Web was originally announced in 2019, but did not begin filming until three years later. By the time the movie arrived in February 2024 – a release date that is often seen as a graveyard for cinema releases – Sony’s previous failure with Morbius seemed to turn many people against the film before it even premiered. The Venom franchise had performed much better than any other films in the Spider-Man-adjacent franchise, but nothing else landed, and Madame Web struggled to make back its $100 million budget during a dismally disappointing theatrical run.
Is ‘Madame Web’ Really That Bad?
For a long time, it looked like Madame Web’s critic score on Rotten Tomatoes was not going to make it out of single figures. After almost 270 reviews, the film sits on a 10% score, with almost every review devolving into the base principle that the movie is “clumsy,” “woodenly acted,” and “a predictable failure in every way.”
A lot of the time, critics can be harsh towards superhero and action movies, pulling the predictable card as a way of knocking down the aggregate score. Madame Web scored a much higher 53% from audiences, but that does not mean that the overall feeling towards the movie was any more positive on the whole. In fact, several reviews simply commented, “Worst Marvel movie ever.” Madame Web is a movie that had the potential to be a decent movie, but, for some reason that no one can seem to work out, Sony has constantly struggled to deliver anything good from their Marvel properties that do not have Marvel Studios involved in them.
Morbius was released in the wake of the huge success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, but having stripped away all Spider-Man references promised by the trailer, the movie then tacked on a post-credit scene featuring the MCU’s Vulture (played by Michael Keaton) and seemed to be setting up a crossover with the Marvel Studios franchise. Fans just weren’t buying it though.
This is something that also happened with Venom: Let There Be Carnage, which set Tom Hardy’s anti-hero on a collision course with Tom Holland’s webslinger, but the tease of Venom facing Spider-Man in the MCU’s multiverse led to nothing more than Hardy’s post-credit appearance in No Way Home before he was sucked back into his own universe for Venom: The Last Dance. There was a time when Venom was possibly set for a larger role, but that ended up being trimmed from the script at some point during development.
If you have not yet seen Madame Web, then you only need to avoid it for another month while scrolling Netflix before it departs the platform – probably only to appear somewhere else in the near future. Stay vigilant out there.
- Release Date
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February 14, 2024
- Runtime
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116 Minutes
- Writers
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Burk Sharpless, Matt Sazama, Kerem Sanga, Claire Parker, S.J. Clarkson
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