“People were canceling their pre-sales…”: the consequences of the Madame Web disaster

The latest film in Sony’s Spider-Man universe got off to a disastrous start.

By banking on a superhero film with a female cast (Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced…) for Valentine’s Day, in a first half deserted by DC and the MCU, Sony took a gamble. A few days after the release of Madame Web, the observation is scathing. This is a huge failure.

With only 15 million dollars in revenue (23 million worldwide), Madame Web was stolen by the Bob Marley biopic, one Love, which brought in twice as many greenbacks. Certainly, this flop must be put into perspective with its modest budget for a blockbuster adapted from a comic book (between 80 and 100 million dollars, far from the 274 million The Marvels). But it goes beyond the simple financial aspect.

Madame Web would make Morbius look like a masterpiece (review)

The new film from Sony’s Spider-Man universe (of which the Weaver is notably absent) was torpedoed by critics, with only 12% positive opinions recorded on Rotten Tomatoes. And the public is hardly more kind with a grade of C+ on Cinema Score, which places it in the category of Batman & Robin, Spawn And… Morbiusthe previous installment of this incomprehensible franchise.

“On Wednesday evening, we could see pre-sales drop in real time as spectators had their tickets refunded“, details a distributor interviewed by the Hollywood Reporter.

The failure of Madame Web is not going to stop Sony in the short term. Kraven the Hunterdirected by JC Chandor, is due out this summer (August 28 in France), and Venom 3 will follow him in November. But don’t expect a sequel to the adventures of Cassandra Web. “We won’t see another Madame Web film for at least 10 years.“, assures another insider cited by THR. “It did not work. Sony tried to make a superhero movie with a difference.”

More serious, the flop of Madame Weba few months after that of The Marvels, could jeopardize projects based on superheroines. Are there films that are not good, where the public shuns the female characters? Men typically make up 65-70% of the audience for superhero films. In the case of Madame Web the audience was 46% female.

An article from The Ankler revealed a few days ago that the series Silk centered on the character of Cindy Moon, co-produced by Sony and coming to Prime Video, was reworked to target the male audience.

“We are in a period of transition when it comes to superhero films“, notes another source from THR. “Maybe there will be fewer films and we will concentrate on the big names. But Kraven is a big hit the discourse could completely change. It is too early to tell.”