Turning Spider-Man Into a Girl Brand Has Been Worse Than Anyone Could've Imagined
In life and in business, there are two types of mistakes one can make.
There are regular-to-bad mistakes that people make everyday — from you and me, all the way up to the president.
Are these mistakes annoying and detrimental? Of course, but life trudges onward regardless.
Then there are the world-shattering, catastrophic mistakes that people make far less frequently.
Those are the sorts of mistakes that you simply don’t come back from, or at least not without an immense amount of pain and introspection.
The Sony-Marvel (and thus Disney-adjacent) Spider-Man spin-off movie “Madame Web” firmly lands in the latter camp.
Even going into its Feb. 14 release, bad reviews and even worse ticket pre-sales hinted that “Madame Web” could be a bomb.
Now, a week after its release, people are beginning to realize just how bad and destructive of a bomb this movie was.
A scathing Monday report from The Hollywood Reporter illuminated that destruction.
“On Wednesday night, you could actually watch advance purchase sales declining in real time as buyers were refunding their tickets,” a major theatrical chain executive told the outlet. “It really says something when you’d rather have Shazam! 2 numbers.”
THR also squashed any hopes for “Madame Web” having a second lease on life like its fellow Spider-Man-less Spidey movie (and enduring meme) “Morbius.”
“Sony’s previous Spider-Man universe movie — 2022’s Morbius — was a critical bust and much-maligned by fanboys online, but at least it managed to earn $170 million worldwide,” THR noted.
It then added: “There’s no such hope for Madame Web. “
But like any particularly bad mistake, it’s not just the immediate impact that’s the issue. There’s also the matter of “down the road.”
“Plus, the feature’s collapse doesn’t just impact this film, but a new potential franchise led by star Dakota Johnson that Sony had hoped to spin out,” THR reported.
So it’s not just the movie itself that was affected by abysmal ticket sales. It’s affected future potential “Madame Web” movies — and possibly the Sony Spider-Verse as a whole.
It’s that bad… but why? Weren’t superhero movies money-printing presses as recently as 2020?
Here’s this author’s take on why “Madame Web” was such a colossal failure:
A Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man in it is a demonstrably tough sell: Yes, the “Venom” movies do well enough at the box office, but Venom has also become a cultural tour de force and an immensely popular “anti-hero” in his own right.
And had Sony simply kept their currently failing “Spider-Verse” to just Spider-Man and Venom, they might have had the beginnings of something special on their hands.
Instead, they’ve completely driven the franchise into the ground with pointless movies focused on B- and C-tier characters like Madame Web, Morbius and Kraven the Hunter.
Spider-Man (as if the name itself isn’t a giveaway) is a boy-centered brand: This may be controversial and is not meant to suggest girls can’t enjoy superheroes (obviously)… but come on guys.
Everything about the Spider-Man ethos is aimed at young men. From Peter Parker’s dogged pursuit of women (Mary Jane, Felicia Hardy, Gwen Stacy) and unending desire to take care of his mother figure, to Spider-Man’s insistence on resolving most of his issues with fisticuffs… this is a franchise aimed at young men and boys.
Trying to turn that on its head by casting four “Spider-Women” (and from my understanding, you never actually see any of the heroines in costume apart from a dream sequence) in a movie nobody was particularly clamoring for was such an obvious recipe for disaster.
It’s also the epitome of laziness as the movie largely seemed to be marketed as “We don’t have a new Spider-Man movie for you… but what about four women who don’t appear to have anything to do with Spider-Man but are kind of dressed like him?”
Going back to “girl brands” for a minute, I’m well aware that a complicated web of licensing rights issues means Sony can only stick to Spider-Man characters in its films, but there are ways to do interesting stories about women in the “Spider-Verse” without making a bunch of women half-hearted Spider-Man knockoffs.
A dark drama involving Stacy (Spidey fans know how this film would end) or a heist movie involving Hardy (who is a burglar known as “Black Cat” in the Spider-Man universe) would have been infinitely more interesting than whatever it was that “Madame Web” was trying to be.
Superhero fatigue is real: It just is.
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