Madame Web is a superhero movie about someone with precognitive powers: To the extent that you can actually understand what her powers are, it’s that she can see the future and in some cases act to stop terrible events from happening. You can tell it’s fiction because this movie exists.
Listless and incoherent throughout, Madame Web is a low-point for the superhero movie era, and I’ve seen Morbius. But not only does it demonstrate the genre’s recent struggles, it points to a way out for Hollywood.
Like Morbius, Madame Web is kinda-sorta-maybe adjacent to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) that has swallowed up so much of moviedom over the last 15 years. It’s kinda-sorta-maybe related in that it opens with the familiar Marvel logo, and it is based on a character who debuted in the pages of one of Marvel’s Spider-Man comics. But although Spider-Man has appeared in a handful of full-on MCU films over the years, the film rights to the character have long been owned by a rival studio, Sony, thanks to some complicated rights deals that go back decades.
After a couple of Spider-Man films underperformed, however, Sony cut a deal with Marvel to let the webhead into the mainline MCU—but Sony would retain the rights to develop films based on ancillary characters from Spider-Man comics, in something that has been referred to as the Spider-Verse. (Even more confusingly, this has very little to do with the animated Spider-Verse movies.) This paved the way for a series of movies based on Spidey villains and side characters, which so far include Venom, Carnage, Morbius, and now, Madame Web.
Madame Web is not a character that most people are familiar with; I grew up subscribing to multiple Spider-Man titles, and even then, I encountered her rarely if ever. So you might be wondering: What is Madame Web about?
Madame Web is about an ambulance driver named, I kid you not, Cassandra Webb, who lives in New York in 2003. Decades earlier, a prologue shows, her pregnant mom spent time in Peru researching rare spiders, which apparently had powers to do…something? It’s hard to say what. Heal people, perhaps? But just as the mother discovers the rare spider she’s been searching for, a glowering bearded guy shoots her and steals the spider to use for his own nefarious purposes. Mama Webb is then taken by what appears to be a group of jungle-men (?) wearing red-and-black leotards (??) decorated to look sort of like a Broadway production of a Spider-Man musical set in the Amazon (???). They swing down from the trees and whisk her away to a mysterious glowing cave place (????), but then, uh, Cassandra’s mom dies anyway.
Back in 2003, Cassandra is involved in a vehicle accident. She blacks out and has a mind-altering experience that is rendered on screen as what I can only describe as a couple minutes of computer-generated graphics goop, with Cassandra floating in the midst of a web (get it?!) of threaded sparkling light and images that will appear later in the film, like a blue balloon. A few minutes later, she attends a baby shower.
Eventually, she’s involved in an attack on the subway by the same guy who killed her mom, only now he’s wearing a black Spider-Man-style costume and crawling on the ceiling. (His name is Ezekiel Sims, but the other characters mostly refer to him as “Ceiling Guy.”) He wants to kill three younger women, because he’s had visions that they will kill him. Apparently, he can see the future too? Also, he can poison people by touching them, and he has stolen a bunch of early 00s National Security Agency facial recognition technology. And every single one of the actor’s lines appear to have been dubbed and possibly totally changed in post-production, so the effect is sort of like watching a foreign film with the English language track on.
In the villain’s visions, the young women who kill him are wearing Spider-Woman-esque costumes, and they demonstrate various superhero-comic-style powers. But I want to make clear: At no point in the movie outside of those visions do any of these women, or for that matter Cassandra, put on superhero costumes and go do superhero stuff. This is a superhero movie in which none of the supposed superheroes ever become actual superheroes. It’s a prequel to an origin story—a setup to a setup.
In other words, it’s incomprehensible superhero-adjacent garbage, but at least the movie seems self-aware about it. There are several scenes devoted to the characters attempting to discern what’s going on—the sort of scenes that would usually serve as tidy exposition dumps—in which generally sensible questions are answered with lines like “What good is science?” and “I don’t know. Crazy shit’s been happening and I don’t know why. Stop asking me.” Fair enough. Eventually, an exasperated Cassandra decides to leave the three young future Spider-Women for a bit, but before she leaves she tells the three younger women, “Just don’t do anything dumb!” and then doubles back to say once more: “Seriously! Don’t do dumb things.” If she could actually see the future, she would know that her warnings were in vain. All of this occurs before she returns to the glowy cave in Peru, where a guy who has somehow been waiting for decades informs her that she has a bunch of other powers too. Sadly, none of these powers include the ability to make Madame Web even remotely entertaining.
Madame Web comes at a perilous time for the superhero movie business. Films based on DC comics underperformed with audiences and critics throughout last year, and two of Marvel’s big 2023 installments—Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and The Marvels—were box office disappointments. The coming year will see just one full-on MCU film (Deadpool & Wolverine), and fewer major superhero films than theaters have hosted in years.
For much of the last decade, people have wondered when the reign of superhero movies would be over, and how it might end. In the wake of last year’s blockbuster failures, Madame Web shows the way out: At some point, the movies will simply be so bad that the genre can’t continue. Yes, superhero movies will still be made; Marvel announced the cast of its forthcoming Fantastic Four reboot this week. But they will occupy a less exalted place in Hollywood and the culture. Inadvertently, then, Madame Web does provide a clear vision of the future—one where superhero movies matter less and less.
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