While superhero movies have been, with a few exceptions, struggling at the box office overall, the recent Madame Web was something more. Critics destroyed Madame Web and the movie hasn’t even broken the $100 million worldwide, making it the definition of a bomb, one of the biggest failures of the 2024 movie release calendar. Sydney Sweeney has now spoken out on the movie flopping, with the equivalent of “Hey man, I just work here.”
Speaking with the L.A. Times, about her new movie Immaculate, Sweeney is asked her thoughts on Madame Web. And she says, not incorrectly, that she was hired to do a job, which she did, and the rest was largely out of her control. Sweeney explained…
I was just hired as an actress in it, so I was just along for the ride for whatever was going to happen.
Nobody likes being associated with a bad movie, so while this looks a bit like Sweeney trying to distance herself from the film, as far as it goes, she isn’t wrong. She was one member of the Madame Web cast, and she’s ultimately only responsible for the part of the movie that was her role, and even that was potentially altered significantly in the editing process. There’s only so much one person can do to make a movie good or bad.
Sweeney’s comments echo the statement made by Madame Web star Dakota Johnson. She lamented that major movies like Madame Web are “made by committee” and there are so many people involved that executives end up having the final say rather than the creative people who made the film.
There’s no need to throw blame around. Madame Web is a bad movie, but one we can all move on from, and we certainly can’t lay blame in a single spot. Movies like Madame Web are, for better or worse, made by committee, and as such there is plenty of blame to spread around, and Sydney Sweeney certainly doesn’t deserve most of it.
If Madame Web had been a hit it almost certainly would have spawned a sequel. As I said in CinemaBlend's Madame Web review, the future of the movie as a franchise seemed to be more of the goal than the movie itself, being one of its major problems. Instead, if the movie is remembered at all, it will simply be remembered as a movie that didn't achieve its goal. It's far from the first movie to try to launch a franchise and fail to do so.
Sydney Sweeney and Dakota Johnson have moved on. They made a movie, it’s done. It wasn’t well received, but they’re not dwelling on that. Dakota Johnson has said that she has now learned that movies like Madame Web aren’t for her. Whether or not Sweeney feels the same way remains to be seen.
