YMMV / Madame Web (2024)

• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • The context of Ezekiel's visions is left unexplained, and instead all that is shown is that an older Sims returns home to find his spider stolen before he is attacked by three costumed figures who let him fall to his death. Cassie suggests in the final fight that it was a case of being Metaphorically True and the events of the visions weren't actually how he was going to die, but it's never confirmed to be this and if it was a potential future then Julia, Mattie and Anya come across as more morally ambiguous characters in those visions instead of superheroes.
  • Ezekiel Sims is not a good man by any standard, having shot a pregnant woman and left her to die to gain his powers. However he then spent every night of the the next 30 years having visions of the three women destined to kill him, the context of which are never fully explained. As a result it's unclear whether in these visions Sims did anything wrong to deserve his fate or even if Julia, Mattie and Anya are heroes in that potential future, and while it doesn't excuse his actions it might be easy to see him as a desperate man who has spent three decades living in fear and is willing to do anything to change his future.
  • For what intent purpose—or rather what extent—besides making apparently very good investments does Ezekiel use his visions for? While he's clearly profited a lot on his own, has he spread the wealth with those who also started in a less than fortunate place or has he unapologetically kept it all for himself and simply become one of the people he claimed thrived in the world while others like him struggled? The latter would be strongly suggested by both the lengths that he went to to get the spider to begin with—in which he killed a pregnant woman while thinking her baby would die too—and the lengths in which he refuses to let a vision about his death come true—trying to murder the three teen girls before they are even a threat to him.
• Ass Pull: The extent of Cassie's powers after she goes blind. Her going blind somehow just expands her clairvoyance to the point where she can use her powers to be annoying (like saying "bless you" before someone sneezes and predicting what food was bought for her). This is especially jarring considering that she says that her powers don't work as simply as predicting someone throwing a fake-out punch, and we're never given a frame of reference for how far of a Distant Finale the final scene of the movie is.
• Bile Fascination: Very similar to the preceding movie of Sony's Spider-Man Universe, Morbius (2022), this movie got a lot of attention right from when the first trailer dropped, even though it's gotten a terrible reception from critics and audiences alike, simply due to the curiosity of it being an increasingly desperate attempt by Sony to cobble together a cinematic universe about Spider-Man side characters without Spider-Man and seeing how badly they've dropped the ball (outside the Venom films which, while also starting with some mockery of their own, have performed much better both critically and financially in comparison).
• Critical Backlash: After receiving a thrashing from critics, some people started to argue that while still bad, it didn't deserve the massive amounts of hate it was getting and was more So Bad, It's Good.
• Designated Hero: Cassie is supposedly the main hero and her character is that she only cares about saving people. But when forced to save the three teenagers, she acts very cold hearted and irritable towards them and at times outright abandons them- in one case, leaving them in the woods for three hours just to go ruffle through some notes. When she rescues them after the diner incident, the only thing she has to say to them is that they only care about themselves, never mind what she just did to them ten minutes earlier.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • Cassie discovering the full story behind her mother's expedition to Peru: She wanted to cure her daughter of myasthenia gravis and refused to believe it was uncurable. Upon realizing her mother loved her all along, Cassie breaks down in tears and hugs a vision of Constance.
  • Cassie slowly becomes a Parental Substitute for the teenage girls she's protecting, who all suffer from having very broken families. It culminates with all three visiting her in the hospital after the battle with Ezekiel and hugging her in her bed.
    Nurse: Are you all immediate family?
    Cassie: Yes. They're all mine.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • "He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died." ^ExplanationThis awkward run-on sentence used by Webb to describe Ezekiel in the teaser spread like wildfire, much akin to "To bats, it's lethal. To humans, it's deadly" from Morbius. The line isn't present in the movie itself, however. It got to the point where John Mulaney even mocked it at the 2024 Academy Awards.
  • It's webbin' time. ^ExplanationDue to the film instantly receiving comparisons to Morbius, some internet denizens quickly began making variations of "It's Morbin' time" and similar memes.
  • "So, while my character in the movie may be able to see the future, I also can and I know what the future brings. I know that when you see Madame Web, you're going to love it. In fact, I think you’re going to see it twice." ^ExplanationFrom a promo video that went memetic due to Dakota Johnson’s incredibly sensuous delivery, with some joking that Sony was attempting to tap into the "coomer demographic".
  • The entire movie is just a Pepsi commercial. ^ExplanationThere's a lot of Pepsi and Pepsi-related Product Placement throughout the entire movie, and the main villain even meets his demise by being crushed by the falling "P" from a Pepsi-Cola sign. This has caused at least a few viewers to call this movie Madame Websi.
  • "I remember all my encounters with you, Madame Web, and I want nothing to do with you." ^ExplanationA moment from Spider-Man: The Animated Series where Madame Web returns to take Spider-Man for his final mission, even though he doesn't want to. The wording made it perfect for people who have no desire to watch the film or to revisit it.
• Moral Event Horizon: Ezekiel Sims crosses it at the beginning of the movie by betraying Constance and leaving her to die. What's worse was that Constance was pregnant with Cassie, and had the village chief and his people not save her, both Constance and Cassie would've died.
• So Bad, It's Good: The film is agreed upon to be worse than Morbius, but most people agree that whereas that movie was simply just boring bad, Madame Web is on the other hand so utterly incompetent in just about every aspect that it makes the movie more enjoyable. The sheer amount of bonkers stuff already mentioned in the spoilers, plus the fact that the actors, writers and producers clearly didn't care, make for one very entertaining watch.
• Special Effect Failure: Many viewers have pointed out that Ezekiel's lines are overdubbed, but very poorly, as the lines frequently don't sync up to his mouth movements and sometimes even continue when his mouth isn't moving at all. While this would be forgivable if the movie's dialogue was originally in another language, the movie was entirely English to begin with. This suggests the use of automated dialogue replacement (a common trait of films that have undergone heavy rewrites), but due to the lack of Filming for Easy Dub, it becomes very evident.
• Suspiciously Similar Song: Soundtrack version. Fans were quick to find out that the main theme of the movie is strangely similar to the main theme of Insomniac's Spider-Man video game. Whether this was intentional or just temporary music that they forgot to replace is up to the listener.
• Tainted by the Preview: The teaser received a very mixed reaction (putting it lightly) due to showcasing questionable-looking special effects, a convoluted story that the trailer spells out for you, and awkward/cliché dialogue, with numerous comparisons to the trailers of Morbius (which, incidentally, shares the exact same writers as this film), or one of the superhero shows produced by The CW. Only a few hours after it was posted, the comments section for the trailer's YouTube video was flooded by people mocking the trailer, primarily by jokingly praising a nonexistent line in it à la Morbius.
• Tear Jerker: Mattie, Julia and Anya all experience Parental Abandonment. Julia mentions that her mother is in a psych ward, which led her to live with her dad and stepmother and she outright says she thinks they don’t want her there. Mattie’s wealthy parents aren’t around much and she is on her own. Anya’s dad was deported and her mother died when she was 5, leading Anya to also live on her own and not wanting to risk either getting deported or going into the foster care system.
• Testosterone Brigade: Despite being a female-oriented superhero movie by virtue of starring 4 heroines, the presence of Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney has attracted the (possibly) unironic interest of male fans. It has been joked that they are the sole reasons for men to invest in yet another film of the so far mixed-to-negatively received SSU that doesn't feature Venom.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Ben and Mary Parker's role in the movie comes down to just being fanservice made to give the story more connection to Spider-Man despite, once again, not having Spider-Man in it, although in this case the teasing becomes almost comically frustrating since neither character has any actual reason to be in the story, aside from Ben being Cassandra's coworker (a role that could've been played by anyone, as none of the main characters had any connection to Peter Parker's origin).
  • Reducing the references to Richard Parker being some sort of spy or government agent like he was in the comics to a mere throwaway Mythology Gag that only comics fans will even pick up on is a weird choice when you also make a key plot point of the movie the fact that Ezekiel Sims has murdered a government agent and hacked the NSA to take over their Sinister Surveillance capabilities to find the girls.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A major criticism about the movie is that, despite being the first live-action appearance of any Spider-Woman, never mind four of them, only Cassandra has any powers and none them get their costumes in the story, nor is there any indication how this ever happens, nor do the other three end up fighting the Big Bad. Instead there's only a few clairvoyant visions promising the characters becoming costumed crime-fighters with powers in the distant future, for a hypothetical followup very few people believe will ever happen. This is made extremely baffling given much of the movie's marketing focused on the characters in their costumes, which raises the question: if the producers knew the audience wanted to see the characters in costumes with powers and used misleading advertisements promising so, why not actually do so in the movie?
  • As several reviewers pointed out the idea of a Marvel thriller movie featuring an ”evil Spider-Man”, which Ezekiel Sims is (right down to the costume), could have actually been amazing and quite scary in The Boys or Brightburn fashion. Spider-Man’s powers means he can come at you from any direction and on any surface, an antagonist with such powers is utterly terrifying. However in the film Ezekiel, along with nonsensical motivations, is repeatedly defeated and ultimately fails do much more than kill Cassandra’s mother in the past, resulting in his role being more Nightmare Retardant, despite the great potential to show what Peter Parker would be like as a villain.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: While some of the cast members do their best with the material, Adam Scott really gets into his role as Uncle Ben, making him one of the best parts of the movie.
• Unexpected Character:
  • While Spider-Woman appearing in the film was a given, nobody expected all of them (with the exception of Jessica Drew, who's off-limits so she can appear in her own solo movie), including Araña/Spider-Girl, to appear in the same film. Mattie Franklin is a particular surprise considering the character has been dead for quite some time in the comics.
  • The film's villain, Ezekiel Sims, is just as much a surprise given he isn't as famous compared to a lot of other Spider-Man villains, and is also deceased in the main comics. While some people may remember him as the 2000s were considered a popular boon time for Spider-Man in both film and comics, it's unlikely a lot of people were expecting him to ever make the transition to a cinematic villain since he was only prominent for one particular totem-based arc in the comics and hasn't made any major waves since then.
• WTH, Costuming Department?: When the characters' superhero costumes were revealed, fan reaction to Mattie Franklin and Anya Corazon's costumes was receptive aside from the lack of eye lenses. Julia Cornwall's costume, however, was largely negatively received not only for the lack of eye lenses but for her chest emblem being overdetailed compared to the costumes worn by her comics counterpart, and the exposed cheeks making the mask look goofy.

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