Madame Web was Supposed to Start a Series

Movies

Madame Web’s failure may not be surprising, but the scope of its fallout is. The Hollywood Reporter has a piece on the new superhero film’s disastrous opening weekend, and watching them try to make sense of its dismal performance is funny. (“I don’t get it! They used obscure characters; they hired a director who’d never worked on a movie before; they targeted an audience that didn’t show up because they don’t like superheroes; what more could the brave souls at Sony have done?”) But most interesting is the reveal that Sony intended Madame Web to be the start of a franchise, and I’m not talking about that idiotic notion of making a shared universe out of a bunch of Spider-Man’s supporting characters but without Spider-Man. (They actually have the nerve to call it “The Spider-Man Universe;” talk about balls.) They wanted Madame Web to kick off a series about the title character and the three Spider-Women she protects throughout the film. Now that it’s set to be a bomb so embarrassing it makes Morbius look like a blockbuster, those plans are scuttled, darn the luck.

You know who could have told them this was a bad idea? All of the people ever. But Madame Web is similar to the MCU’s recent movies in that it’s the product of the laziness that comes from arrogance bred by success. A lot of the awful superhero movies you’re seeing now are the result of the MCU’s success, especially Guardians of the Galaxy. That movie was an experiment to see if people would come out for the Marvel brand as opposed to the characters. I understand that Iron Man and Captain America weren’t top-tier Marvel heroes before the movies (although I think Cap was a little better known than people let on), but they’re easier sells to a general audience than a talking raccoon and his anthropomorphic tree sidekick. When Guardians was a hit, it told Marvel/Disney that people were hungry for superheroes – and, perhaps, the Marvel brand – and would see anything even remotely related to a comic book fantasy, and other studios took notice. What they didn’t factor into their analysis was that Guardians of the Galaxy was a good movie that made people care about the raccoon and the tree because that’s not how businessmen see art. So, superhero movies outside of the MCU tried to replicate the 1s and 0s without regard to the soul, and that’s how we got failure after failure (with one or two exceptions) while the Marvel train rode high. At a certain point, Marvel/Disney followed the same track, ditching quality control and focusing on social messaging, thinking they’d become too big to fail.

Now, they and their competitors (or, in this case, fellow travelers) are paying for their hubris. Look at this THR article, for example; they bemoan “superhero fatigue,” and while they note that Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 was the only one to make a profit this past year, they don’t look into why. It doesn’t occur to them that it was a good movie about characters that connected to the audience and made them feel something genuine. They don’t talk about how it had a bad opening weekend due to a reluctant audience that Marvel had burned too many times but held on in subsequent weeks because good word of mouth spread. No, it must just be a fluke. (The irony that it’s a sequel to the film that kicked all this off hammers home that they don’t get it.)  And that’s why a big part of me doubts superhero movies will get better anytime soon, at least in general. They don’t understand their failures, and they don’t even seem to want to; they’ll come up with some half-assed explanation for why it was beyond their control and continue down the path of diminishing returns. They’ll keep hiring directors whose résumés include little beyond IKEA commercials, they’ll begin production before everyone is on the same page about the script, they’ll “fix” things in editing to the point where the movie doesn’t hold together, and they’ll wash their hands of any responsibility. But at least we won’t get any Madame Web sequels; that’s something, I guess.

Two final takeaways from the THR piece:

1. They didn’t blame COVID, which shocked me so much I checked to see if it was raining frogs.

2. Their “insider” thinks Kraven the Hunter might be “a gigantic hit.” That’s worth a laugh or two. And I know Venom was a hit; that’s because people like Venom, the character, even though introducing him without Spider-Man is dumb. But Venom: Let There Be Carnage made more than a third less money; that doesn’t bode well for Venom 3, and this, combined with the failures of Morbius and Madame Web, is very bad news for Kraven.