An Ode to Madame Web

I've recently discovered that my favorite type of movies are "movies that shouldn't exist." Let me clarify: this is not a value judgment. When I say "shouldn't exist," I mean that the world as it is now, the culture we live in, the sheer expense of making a film, the organization needed to bring a film to completion, are factors unavoidable and, for some, insurmountable obstacles to making a film. Normally movies in this quasi-genre are low-budget, high-ambition masterpieces like Blonde Death, Vengeance is Mine, or the works of Wakaliwood studios or Motern Media. But in 2024, the most expensive and, sadly, likely highest-grossing film in this genre was released: Madame Web.

Borne of Sony’s foolish, myopic attempt to turn Spider-Man F-listers into individual blockbusters meant to rival the Marvel-Disney machine, Madame Web cost $80 million before marketing. This is a film that should not exist. No one, and I say this as a very well-read comics guy, knows or cares about Madame Web. Her biggest turn, in the ‘90s animated Spider-Man series, was as an exposition machine and complete non-character. It's an unbelievable act of greed to think an audience would watch a tangentially connected superhero movie just because it gestures, sort of, at the concept of a Spider-Man. They can't even say the words "Spider-Man" in the film! It was an $80 million cash grab by the last studio in town run by people both misguided enough to believe this plan could be a success and committed enough to the art of filmmaking to actually release it in theaters. This was not WB head David Zaslav burying copies of movies in the desert for unclear tax reasons or a personal vendetta. Even when the trailer set the internet on fire with Dakota Johnson's delightfully deadpan delivery of, "He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died," this movie was always going to come out and I was always going to see it.

I saw it five times. This is so much more than a bad superhero film or exercise in lazy franchise building. This is not Morbius, with its tacky gestures toward deeper meaning and a star whose appeal is years past its expiration date. This is not The Flash, a tortured production staggering toward the finish line through almost a decade of revisions and an embarrassed reshuffling of "the canon" that no one but the most devoted sickos could possibly care about. This is simply a film, poorly made, almost entirely devoid of irony, starring people you have heard of who are not performing on a level expected of this kind of visibility (except Dakota Johnson, who is perfect).

Part of the hurdle when transitioning to watching micro-budget cinema is that money can buy a filmmaker a certain level of competence. A low budget means less time, worse gear, and fewer opportunities to hire talented people you don’t personally who are still willing to work for cheap. Often, when people mock low-budget films for having a boom mic in a shot or a mistimed audio track in a scene, they're unaware of how fundamentally hard it is to make a film. While that does extend to even larger-budget films, that million-dollar price tag means that you can usually afford to reshoot a scene and run the audio back again to make sure it lines up. The seams of filmmaking are covered up with a skin graft of a few million dollars and some talented craftsmen, leaving the average moviegoer unaware of how many things can go wrong behind the scenes. If a movie is bad, it's simply "bad," the context of which might elude the viewer, even if they can articulate why the finished product isn't enjoyable to watch.

Money did not protect Madame Web and we as a culture are better for it. As AI continues to dominate the cultural conversation around art, the argument rests on the distinctions between its poor, inhuman quality as it functions now and how well it may work in the future. But AI, no matter how well it might function someday in the future (and I remain dubious that it will ever overcome its inner soullessness), can never reveal anything about itself to the viewer because it has nothing to reveal. It simply exists, a product made in a lab. No filigree, no unique qualities, no personal stamp of an artist: product, not art. And Madame Web, despite its origins as a product, despite its cynical design and barefaced "you suckers will pay for anything if its got superheroes in it" energy, is art.

It was made by people with a desire to make something unique and true to them. The whip-pan editing and shoddy cuts were done by Leigh Folsom Boyd, an editor whose style is clearly visible in the other projects she's worked on like Fast & Furious, Furious 7, and Spider-Man: No Way Home. The film, for all its poor choices and acting, was directed by SJ Clarkson, a director who had formerly mostly worked in TV on shows like Defenders, Jessica Jones, and Orange is the New Black. Her interest in female characters and people of different backgrounds coming together for a unified purpose is a throughline in her work. And Dakota Johnson, my favorite nepo baby (a grand-nepo baby, even) sprints across the fine wire line of caring just enough about the film to force you to take it somewhat seriously while also giving Cassie Webb a detached air that makes her character arc feel breezy and predetermined all at the same time.

It would be very easy to completely mock this film, to treat it purely as a punching bag. I see the temptation to burn it at the stake as a wicker man, symbolic of the current era of studio excess and visible disdain for an audience's time and energy. The villain's mouth is almost never on screen, leading to the most egregious use of ADR I've seen in a film outside of some giallos; Sydney Sweeney almost seems determined to beat the allegations that she's a good actress; the plot and scene-to-scene choices are so confusing as to almost explicitly require ADR-additions just to help the audience follow along.

And yet, I have nothing in my heart but love for this film. I adore it in all its misshapen, broken mess; I have only an affectionate protectiveness for it, not judgement. It is a film that is a film and that's all it could ever be. Made by humans, poorly, created for crass and financial goals, visibly, and released to a public who could only hiss and mock it. It is exactly what it is, and I love it dearly.

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