Checking in with Madame Web

Madame Web came out over Valentine's/President's Day weekend to a very weak, if not really worse than expected, audience response.

How do things stand now?

The film, which was in 27th place at the box office on the weekend of March 22-24, finished up well short of the $50 million mark domestically (under $44 million actually), and did not do much better internationally--pulling in just under $56 million there, to leave its global total a bit below $100 million at last report from Box Office Mojo. It is not inconceivable that the movie will somehow make the remaining $800,000 or so to break the $100 million barrier, and thus technically be a "$100 million hit," but that just does not mean what it used to--especially for a franchise superhero film, and at that, one from the Spider-Man universe.

One may add to this that the film's audience scores are 57 percent on Rotten Tomatoes and 2.6 on Internet Movie Data Base.

The result is that in contrast with those role films that manage to triumph over a poor start (like last year's Elemental), this movie's flop status still stands--and shows every sign of continuing to stand, with all that implies for any schemes for spinning off other movies from this one, the Sony Spider-Man Universe that already took a hit rather than scored one with 2022's Morbius, every other scheme for squeezing more money out of audiences through the use of less well-known superheroes in lower-key films, and the superhero genre generally, though of course, a good many such efforts are doubtless locked in, and the fact remains that Hollywood has no plans for what to do with itself as its longstanding model of filmmaking becomes untenable. Except, perhaps, to bet on mighty Artificial Intelligences somehow coming to its rescue, the same as the rest of the business community these days (no matter how much certain billionaires would have us believe otherwise as they flog silly Frankenstein complex stuff on TV).