Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney’s “astoundingly abysmal” superhero flop has just landed on Netflix
Madame Web, the 2024 superhero film that spawned millions of memes but bombed at the box office, has found itself a new streaming home in the UK. After previously being available on NOW, it has now departed there and swung on over to Netflix.
The film stars Dakota Johnson as Cassie Webb, a woman who keeps seeing visions of a Spider-Man looking assassin and three women he is planning to kill before they themselves become superheroes.
She’s also got a past that she needs to confront that involves her mother in the Amazon researching spiders right before she died.
It also stars Christy‘s Sydney Sweeney, Superman‘s Isabela Merced, American Horror Story‘s Emma Roberts, and Severance‘s Adam Scott.
But the big names didn’t draw people to cinemas, and it only made $100 million. However, it did do well on US Netflix when it joined the service last year – could it do the same in the UK?
Sony Pictures
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Over on Rotten Tomatoes, the film only has a 53% positive rating from fans, and an especially brutal 10% rating from 279 critic reviews.
Among the savage beatings Madame Web received, Globe and Mail called it “astoundingly abysmal” and Empire said that it’s “both over-written and underwritten at the same time”.
The Atlantic went in hard on the acting, noting the “sheer lack of effort on display in the acting, storytelling, and set pieces. To say that Johnson in particular phoned this performance in would be an insult to Alexander Graham Bell.
“It doesn’t help that every other performance has a strange, stilted energy; even when everyone’s in the same room together, too many line readings feel like they’re being delivered with a Zoom delay.”
Sony Pictures
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To be fair to Johnson, she herself said that she was expecting Madame Web to be received the way it was.
“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made – and it’s even starting to happen with the little ones, which is what’s really freaking me out – decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee,” she said.
“Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to f**king want to see those.”
Madame Web is available to stream now on Netflix.
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Joe Anderton is a freelance news writer at Digital Spy, having worked there since 2016. In his time, he’s covered a host of live events and interviewed celebrities big and small. A big fan of TV and movies both mainstream and obscure, Joe also enjoys video games and in particular PlayStation. Joe currently does not use Twitter, but he only ever used it to tell people to watch the film Help! I’m a Fish.
