My best theatrical experience of 2024 is Dune: Part 2. My second best theatrical experience of 2024 is Madame Web. Truly.
Now streaming, available for (unfortunately expensive) rental, Madame Web no longer demands that you head to theaters to see it (though maybe wait until the price comes down), and for the right kind of viewer, I would heartily recommend what is easily the most bizarre superhero movie in the modern era, which I consider started with FOX’s X-Men in the year 2000. Now, 24 years later, I promise that you have never seen anything like this.
The best way this can be described is as The Room of superhero movies, the famously awful film that is watched because it is awful. So bad it’s good, as we often say. I know this is a companion film to something also terrible like Morbius in the FOX non-Spider-Man-having Spider-Man universe, but while Morbius was a meme, it was also sort of just a chore and Jared Leto snarling is not really fun nor entertaining, however bad the movie may be more generally.
Madame Web is just a completely insane movie. It’s based on an obscure Spider-Man character who is supposed to be an old, blind woman, but instead is Dakota Johnson, star of 50 Shades of Grey and Suspiria, gifted with spider-powers that are not actual spider-powers, but just the ability to briefly see into the future. A sort of micro Edge of Tomorrow situation where she can avoid something or change something the next go-round.
For some reason, Sony also thought this was time to introduce not just one but three different Spider-Women as supporting characters, rather than giving any of them their own movie as all three are more relevant than Madame Web. What is somewhat maddening is that this background cast includes the likes of the hugely popular Sydney Sweeney, and also Isabela Merced, about to be a star in the DCU as Superman Legacy’s Hawkgirl and with a big role as Dina in season 2 of The Last of Us on HBO. They easily could have carried a solo Spider-Woman film in the right hands.
And all these women are utterly wasted. This is easily the least amount of action there has ever been in a superhero movie. Two big sequences end with Johnson hitting the bad guy with a vehicle because no one here as actual superpowers except him. Ezekiel Sims is another baffling mystery here, a Z-tier Spider-Man villain who doesn’t even shoot webs, he can just climb walls and be strong. None of the actual stars of this movie have powers minus Johnson’s tiny future-seeing abilities. And both her and Sims powers were given to them by mythical Amazonian spiders, not anything radioactive like Peter. Sims also has a bizarre dub over his performance for most of the movie that remains inexplicable to this day.
Oh, and you do meet Peter Parker. As a baby, when he arrives after being delivered by his mother, Emma Roberts. Adam Scott plays Uncle Ben, leading some to call this the best movie about Spider-Man’s uncle’s co-worker there’s ever been.
It remains impossible to understand why this film was made, why Johnson, Merced or Sweeney were not just given a Spider-Woman movie instead of whatever…this is. Though if the same people were involved (and these are the writers of Morbius, naturally) that would have gone poorly as well. I do not expect the next Sony spider-film, Kraven, also out this year, to be this level of hilariously terrible, and so I think you should watch this. The Venom movies are dumb but genuinely pretty fun. Morbius was bad in a not-fun way. Madame Web is bad in a very, very amazing way, and I suggest you watch this with as many friends as possible, so long as they know what they’re getting into.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
