I think it’s safe to call it–Madame Web is a flop. Like Morbius but unlike Venom, the film was unable to overcome abysmal reviews to draw audiences in. As it stands as I write this, the film has earned $97.1 million worldwide. That’s slightly more than its reported budget, but way less than the $200 million that it needs to break even. With it shedding around 50% of its box office every week, and it soon to go away to make room for another Sony blockbuster, Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire, there is little chance of it breaking even over the remainder of its theatrical run.
With two major flops back-to-back in a market that seems to be weakening for comic book movies, you’d think that Sony would be in a blind panic. You’d think that they’d be circling the wagons, maybe even asking Kevin Feige to take on more of their Spider-Man Universe films. I’m sure a lot of fans wish that Disney would open up their wallets again and pay whatever they need to get the rights to the Spider-Man characters back.
Don’t hold your breath.
I’ll explain why in a second, but let’s first examine how we got here.
Amazing Spider-Man 2 was supposed to be a billion-dollar baby for Sony. After all, it was following 2012’s Amazing Spider-Man, which earned $758 million worldwide. Sequels usually do better. And this one was going to have Spidey facing off against Electro, played by Oscar-winner Jamie Foxx. Better than that, the film would be tackling the legendary “Death of Gwen Stacy” storyline, where Emma Stone’s Gwen would meet her end at the hands of Dale DeHaan’s Green Goblin. And if that weren’t enough to make fanboys throw money at the screen, the film would also have a cameo by Paul Giamatti playing the Rhino, which would be part of the many hints in the film of the formation of the Spidey villain supergroup, the Sinister Six. Spidey fans would come out in droves.
And they did. But not enough to have the film cross the $1 billion threshold. The film made a paltry $709 million worldwide, which was enough for a profit of around $70 million dollars. I’d take that money. I’m sure you would too. But Sony, who was expecting at least $300 million more in profit, it was a massive disappointment. While many other studios would have killed for any of their films make that much money, for Sony it was reboot time once again.
In 2015, this reboot happened in a way that made a lot of comic book fans happy. Sony entered into an agreement Marvel Studios where Spider-Man would enter into the Marvel Cinematic Universe and Marvel Studios would co-produce the Spider-Man films with Sony.
The partnership was a successful one. Sony got not one but two billion dollars plus films out of the arrangement so far. But the studio wasn’t satisfied. It decided to create a shared universe out of the 900 other Spider-Man related characters it had the rights to. The new line of films would start with the long in-development Venom film and would not crossover with the MCU.
On the surface, to the layman, this might have seemed like a wonderful idea. 900 characters!?! That is a rich and fertile cornucopia of IP for Sony to choose from. Not really, though. While Spider-Man has one of the more interesting supporting casts around and one of the best rogues galleries in comics, there are a lot of clunkers in those 900 characters. The reason why a rumor about a potential Aunt May film got so much traction because she is a far more popular character than, say, Mindworm, Kangaroo or Stegron the Dinosaur Man.
But there are problems with even the more popular characters too. The main reason why a lot of them were popular was because a connection with Spider-Man. Take Venom for instance. Venom’s comic book origin ties directly into Spider-Man. In the aftermath of the Marvel Super Heroes Secret Wars miniseries, Spider-Man comes back with a new black costume that can respond to his thoughts. Instead of being some kind of alien technology, it was a living alien symbiote that was attempting to permanently bond with Peter Parker. Using the symbiote’s weakness to sound, Spidey removes it by standing in a church bell tower while the church bell was ringing, angering the symbiote. The same church was later visited by Eddie Brock, who hated Spider-Man for exposing his manufacturing of a story in his job as a reporter. Recognizing a person who hated Spider-Man as much as it did, the symbiote bonded with Brock and they became Venom, a villain bent on killing Spider-Man, one who didn’t register on Spidey’s Spider-Sense and knew all of his secrets.
This link to Spider-Man made Venom extremely popular. So much so, I had concerns at the time about the film going forward without this connection. But the movie audience didn’t have any concerns. Venom was a hit and so was its sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, although it made less money than the predecessor. Another sequel will be arriving later on this year.
While the Venom films were popular with audiences, they weren’t a hit with the critics. The films earned a 30% and a 57% fresh respectively on Rotten Tomatoes. The scores make the Venom films the Citizen Kane of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) compared to the films that came next, but they still weren’t good reviews.
However, Sony learned the wrong lesson from this. They came to believe that reviews didn’t matter, that fans would come out to see their SSU films no matter how bad they were.
Their next film would prove them wrong.
On paper, Morbius should have been an easier sell for Sony. His origin isn’t as intricately tied into Spider-Man as Venom’s was, the character had headlined a number of series on his own. And Oscar winner Jared Leto agreed to star as the character. Unfortunately, a perfect storm of events happened to cause it to fail.
You cannot discount the fact that the worst global pandemic in modern history hit as the film was due to be released had an effect on its box office. However, that disaster was puny compared to the reviews it got. It currently stands at 15% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes. Reviewers called it “dull,” “unwatchable,” and “riddled with plot holes.” And this is with two rounds of reshoots. It was so bad that the Internet started to make fun of the film through memes and sarcastic tweets.
And this is how lunkheaded Sony is. They thought the wags on the Internet were lovingly mocking the film, so, they rereleased it. But the Internet wasn’t lovingly mocking the film, they were just mocking it. The film died another, more embarrassing death the second time around.
At least Morbius had the potential to be good. Madame Web was pretty much doomed from the start.
If you went to every comic book convention in the United States looking for Madame Web cosplay before the film came out, I’d bet you a hundred dollars you wouldn’t find any. You wouldn’t find her on any t-shirts of the attendees either. If you wanted her action figure, you’d have to hope a vendor had one from her lone toy appearance in the 1998 Sneak Attack Spider-Man line, but it will cost you at least $50 because they didn’t make a lot of them.
Why? Because Madame Web is one of the more obscure characters in the Spider-Man mythos. She made a handful of appearances since she was introduced in 1980, so few that even hard-core Spider-Man fans might not know who she was. Why? Because the character is, as I said a year ago, “a mutant who has telepathic and precognitive abilities. She is also portrayed as a septuagenarian suffering from myasthenia gravis who is blind and constrained to a chair with a web like series of tubes leading to it that keeps her alive.” That is the type of character that lends itself to select appearances. There are little chances for a high-action spinoff or her to join the Avengers. She serves a very specific role and that role is a supporting one.
It boggles the mind that Madame Web would actually be one of the female members of Spider-Man’s supporting cast that would be on a list to be considered for a movie, let alone complete the filmmaking process and actually become a film. I’d think the natural choice would be the Jessica Drew Spider-Woman, a character who supported a number of comic book series in her history and even briefly had a Saturday-morning cartoon in the 1970s. Or I’d go with more modern heroines popular enough to have their own series. Characters like Black Cat, Silver Sable or Silk. All three were considered for a film in the past. All three have now been shifted to development for a TV series.
With all these worthy candidates for films other than Madame Web, you’d think Sony would have a really good story for the character. A stunning work of unimaginable genius that would redefine the superhero movie for generations. That idea went out the window as soon as the trailer dropped. To say the trailer was uninspiring would be an understatement. At least the Morbius trailer looked exciting. The Madame Web trailer was flat and pedestrian. Instead of making me want to see it, it left me cold. I was not alone.
The sad fact about it is that Sony really thought they had a winner on their hands. Madame Web wore its desire to be a franchise starter on its sleeve. And I’m not just talking about including three characters who were Spider-Women in the comics appearing in the film as MacGuffins. Why three? Wouldn’t it be better if it was just one character? From a story standpoint, yes. From a “throwing ideas up at a wall and seeing if they stick” perspective, no. Sony was hoping that one or all of the Spider-Woman would catch the audience’s fancy, generating interest in spinoffs with one or all of them. For that to happen, there had to be an audience.
But the film was also setting up another franchise feature. This might be a spoiler for you, but it has been mentioned in many reviews of the film, so I feel safe mentioning it here. Adam Scott plays the work partner to Dakota Johnson’s character. They are both EMTs. Scott’s character name? Ben Parker. His sister-in-law, Mary (Emma Roberts), is pregnant with his nephew and gives birth during the course of the film. Yes, Adam Scott is playing Uncle Ben.
By this point, everyone should know who Uncle Ben is in the Spider-Man universe. So, it looks like Sony was trying to tie Madame Web into the continuity of one of their Spider-Man properties. The question is, which one? Rumor has it that it was originally supposed to be the Andrew Garfield version of Spidey and the film was originally supposed to be set in the 1990s. Reshoots moved the date the film was set in forward, which was according to rumors to have it instead tie in the Tom Holland version of the character.
I call shenanigans on this rumor. And I’ll use math to prove it. The Marvel Cinematic Universe: An Official Timeline officially states that Spider-Man: Homecoming takes place in 2016. Marvel officially said that Peter Parker would be 15 or 16 in the film. That would put his date of birth in 2000 or 2001. Madame Web takes place in 2003. Which would mean that the Peter Parker born in the film would have been 12 0r 13 at the time of Homecoming. A little bit younger than Marvel said Tom Holland’s character was. Besides, while there has been crossover between the SSU and the MCU, great pains were taken to keep the two shared realities separate. I doubt that Kevin Feige would allow this bit of continuity be set up without his approval and I know he wouldn’t let it be set up in a film this bad.
What do I think the plan was? I think unless Sony was really bad at math, they were trying to introduce a Spider-Man of its own that it could make films with without Marvel’s input or approval. I mean, Scott and Roberts are too big of stars to just have these small of roles in this film. I think Sony was planning to use them again in the future. And as much as I like the actors, I doubt that Sony had a Ben Parker and his Sister-In-Law, Mary film planned. I think they were going to be part of bringing a Spider-Man into their SSU continuity that they could freely use in crossing over with their other properties like Venom and Kraven. It is a moot point now, but that would be my guess.
Sidebar here: The award for the dumbest take in this whole rigamarole is the unnamed non-Sony executive speaking to The Hollywood Reporter who blamed the failure of Madame Web on his theory:“I don’t know if women are enough to carry the box office here.” I’m glad he (and you know it had to be a he) cleared that up for me. Silly goose that I am, I thought people stayed away because of the 12% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes, or because the film was called “dull” and “boring,” the acting being “minimalist bordering on somnambulant,” its “limp dialogue” and “annoying special effects,” that the film is “a bafflingly lazy stew of comic-book clichés,” comparing it to “a bad cover of already forgettable 2000s-era superhero movies,” that all Cassandra can do is “yell at people to move out of the way or hit them with a car,” having the villain’s “motivations…never explored and rarely explained,” or having its star low-key, passive aggressively diss the film while on its publicity tour. But, no, it was because there were vaginas up on the screen! Four of them!
Sony seems to not know how bad its SSU films or doesn’t care. I don’t know what one is more infuriating. What I do know is that things will be getting way worse before it gets better.
First up, in August, is Kraven the Hunter. The film was once set to be released before Madame Web but was bumped back due to the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike. I have the same reservations about this film that I did about Venom. Kraven is a villain who works best when he has Spider-man to play off of. And unlike Venom, he doesn’t a meaty hook like being bonded to an alien to build his own story from. In the comics, he is basically a big game hunter, which, based on the trailer, the film seems to be moving away from. As a matter of fact, it looks like Sony is moving so far away from the comic book Kraven that it makes you wonder why they keeping the character named Kraven. Not to mention one of the characters will be another Spider-Man villain, The Rhino, but drastically different than the comics. Why even bother?
After this, we get Venom: The Last Dance. Very little is known about the film at this point, except that the film will have its third director in as many years.
And then we get into the theoretical films. These are films that have been in development for years, are still listed as being in active development on the SSU’s Wikipedia page but have not quite made it on the schedule.
Let’s start off with the one most likely to hit movie screens: The Sinister Six. Sony has been jonesing to do a Sinister Six film for over a decade, but the project has never been a close to becoming a reality as it is now. The post-credit scene for Morbius featured Michael Keaton’s Vulture from the MCU suggesting to Morbius that they start a team to do some good. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to believe that team will be the Sinister Six, and it’s a safe bet that one or both characters will be appearing in the post-credits scene of Kraven the Hunter and Venom: The Last Dance, trying to recruit them as well.
Once again, the team works best in relation to Spider-Man. In a brilliant plot idea, the comic book version of the team was formed when a group of Spidey villains, sick and tired of him beating them all one-on-one, came together to gang up on him. It didn’t work, but it still was a unique idea for the time. Having them team up without Spider-Man makes them more of a store-brand Avengers than anything else. The one thing the project had going for it was that Drew Goddard, the showrunner on the excellent Netflix Daredevil series, was tapped to write and direct the film. However, Goddard has been hired by James Gunn to be part of his team bring his DCU line of films to life. Producer Amy Pascal has stated she was willing to wait for Goddard. However, Keaton is an extremely young-looking 72 years old, but 72 nonetheless. There is not a lot of time to pull the trigger on this version of the concept.
Another project is one that at one time had a release date. That would be El Muerto, which was originally supposed to hit theaters in January of this year. The project was essentially a vanity project for popular Puerto Rican rapper Bad Bunny after his performance in Bullet Train and his skill as a part-time wrestler for the WWE (The character is a professional wrestler who gains superpowers). However, the Writer’s Guild strike caused the production to be delay, which caused a conflict with Bad Bunny’s touring schedule and the rapper had to drop out of the film. The film is still in development, but who would want to get Bad Bunny’s sloppy seconds?
Would you have been interested in seeing Spike Lee directing a film featuring Todd McFarlane’s Spawn? You almost had one. Sort of.
Nightwatch is an odd character for Sony to choose to adapt to the screen. Not just because it is so obscure. I mean, the character briefly had its own series for 12 issues in 1994, so it wasn’t all that obscure. No, the reason why the character is such a weird choice for Sony to make a movie out of is the fact that he is Image Comics’ Spawn with the serial numbers filed off.
See, Todd McFarlane became a big star while working for Marvel Comics. especially for his work on their Spider-Man titles. So, popular, that he (and other popular creators at Marvel) pressed for a bigger cut of the money he was making for the company. Marvel refused. So, McFarlane and his fellow creators left Marvel and started up Image Comics. McFarlane created Spawn, a creator-owned series that starred an African American man who died in his origin story whose power included super strength, agility and reflexes whose special suit has a flowing cape that responds to his mental commands.
Spawn was an enormous success and Marvel, never one to refrain from pettiness and spite, created Nightwatch, an African American man who died in his origin story whose power included super strength, agility and reflexes whose special suit has a flowing cape that responds to his mental commands.
It has never been confirmed by anyone at Marvel that they were copying Spawn but look at the image above. Nightwatch is on the left, Spawn is on the right. If you can’t see any similarities between the two, then I’m sure Marvel’s attorneys would like to get in contact with you as a potential expert witness.
It is truly bizarre that Sony, out of the hundreds of characters it has access to, would pick such a legally actionable one. After all, McFarlane is currently trying to get another Spawn film made starring Jamie Foxx, and wouldn’t want any competition, you’d think. Even more bizarre that for about seven months in 2018, from March to October, Spike Lee was rumored to be considering directing the film. Yes, Spike Lee of Do The Right Thing and Inside Man. That would have been something.
There is also a film based on the female superhero Jackpot in the works. The character’s main claim to fame is that when she was introduced, Marvel hinted that it was Mary Jane Watson behind the mask. It wasn’t, at least not originally, but they have recently had Mary Jane take up the identity in the comics. It is not known which version of the character will be in the film, but it will be written and possibly directed by Marc Guggenheim, who was a Spider-Man comic book writer when Jackpot was introduced.
An interesting project is Hypno-Hustler, another incredibly obscure Spidey villain. It is interesting because Donald Glover has been attached to the project as star and producer. But my interest begins and ends with Glover’s involvement. If he, like Bad Bunny, leaves the project, I can’t see it being very good.
There are also unnamed projects in the works from writer Robert Orci and actress/director Olivia Wilde. Nothing is really known about these projects except that Orci’s project involves a Marvel character that Sony has the rights to but might not be as Spider-Man adjacent as the other SSU films and Wilde’s project involves a female superhero. Rumor has it that it might be the Jessica Drew Spider-Woman, which would be a reason why they went with lesser-known Spider-Women in Madame Webb.
If that slate seems underwhelming to you, then I agree with you. You might be happy that the offerings are so lackluster, with more misses likely than hits. The more bombs they have, the more likely the rights will revert back to Marvel, like the Fantastic Four and X-Men did.
To this I say: don’t get your hopes up. Marvel only got the FF and X-Men back because they bought Fox outright. After the pandemic, where Disney lost $4 billion, they don’t have the money to buy a company the size of Sony. And if they did, the government might not approve the sale because it could violate monopoly laws. And believe it or not, Sony might not be in as bad shape as we all think they are.
FilmBuffOnline Head Honcho Rich Drees recently crunched some numbers basing this on all the live action Spider-Man and related films from under the new post-Spider-Man: Far From Home deal as outlined in last year’s MCU: The Reign Of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards, with Sony keeping all the box office from the films they produce.
B = Budget (per wikipedia)
BE = Breakeven numbers, based on 2.5 times budget, theatrical ticket split/advertising
BO: Box Office
Morbius
B=$83m
BE=$207.5m
BO=$167.5m
FINAL= -$40m
Madame Web
B=$80m
BE=$200m
BO=$100m (estimate if the film goes another 10 days before ending theatrical run)
FINAL= -$100m
Venom
B=$116m
BE=$290m
BO=$856m
FINAL= +$566m
Venom: Let Their Be Carnage
B=$110m
BE=$275m
BO=$507m
FINAL= +$232m
Spider-Man: No Way Home
B=$200m
BE=$500m
BO=$1.9b
FINAL=$1.4b
$1400m
$232m
$566m
-$100m
– $40m
—————-
$2058m
or
$2.058 Billion
So, even though they have to big flops back-to-back, their relatively low budgets haven’t really made that much of a dent in the profits Sony gets from the Venom films and their overall partnership with Marvel. Will they eventually? Yes, especially if either of their two cash cows falter. But they do have a cushion to work with.
This makes it the right time to try to right their ship. These are my suggestions how they can do that, somewhat in order.
Fire Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless
If you hire a chauffeur and he drives one of your cars into the lake, and then he drives another car off of the cliff, you’d fire him, right? Well, Sazama and Sharpless are the chauffeurs and Morbius and Madame Web are the cars. The pair wrote both of those box office bombs, although director S.J. Clarkson and screenwriter Claire Parker “molded” Madame Web after the pair got done with it. Morbius can be blamed on them and only them.
Regardless, whether they are wholly to blame for what happened to those two movies or not, they are at least partially to blame. Sony should lose their number.
Hire Phil Lord and Christopher Miller
I’m not saying Sony needs a Kevin Feige or James Gunn like guru to run the SSU, but it probably wouldn’t hurt. And the two best candidates are working on the Sony lot as we speak. Phil Lord and Christopher Miller have made the animated Spider-Verse film the envy of every studio. Not only do they make money, but also, they are great films. They won one Oscar for Into the Spider-Verse and were nominated for another one for Across the Spider-Verse. That is a proven track record. If Sony truly wants a great shared universe with its Spider-Man characters, go to the guys who already made a great shared universe with its Spider-Man characters.
Move Away From The Obscure Characters Comic Fans Don’t Even Know
Sony seems to be using two types of characters for their SSU, villains to populate their Sinister Six film, and obscure characters they can put their own stamp on. If you are making films out of comic book characters that comic book fans don’t even know, you’re losing a big part of your audience right off of the bat. And if they comic fans do know the characters, they won’t like the changes that you made. Sony should aim at adapting characters that were the most popular from the comics. Do a live-action Miles Morales Spider-Man film. Bring Black Cat and Silk back to the big screen. Or even characters that they have the rights to that were popular enough to headline their own comic book features like Man-Wolf or Solo. If they need a specific example, I have the perfect concept for them.
Two Words: Spider-Girl
When I saw Tobey Maguire return as Peter Parker in Spider-Man: No Way Home, I was, as many were, overcome with a wave of nostalgia. I wished that I could see him in another Spider-Man movie. Then the though occured to me: Spider-Girl. In the comics, Spider-Girl was May “Mayday” Parker, the teenage daughter of Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson in an alternate future. Mayday inherited her father’s powers at the age of 15 and uses them to fight crime, much to her parents’ chagrin. It has been 17 years since the end of the Raimi Spider-Man films, just the right amount of time for Spider-Girl to take place in that reality with Tobey’s Peter Parker as her father. The character was very popular in the comics, and it would provide Sony with a Spider-Man tie-in free from Marvel Studios influence. And she would be a better choice for a film than Madame Web or Jackpot.
In conclusion, the world of comic book films is at a crossroads. Tastes are changing. There might not be “superhero fatigue,” but people are always tired of bad movies. Sony needs to get its act together, or its shared Spider-Man Universe might go down in flames.
