How Sydney Sweeney Feels About Marvel's Madame Web Flopping At The Box Office

Hey, remember "Madame Web?" It's fine if you don't, but I'll quickly refresh your memory. Just as Sony's weird little cinematic universe of sidelined "Spider-Man" characters started petering out in earnest (after "Morbius" but before "Kraven the Hunter," to give you a sense of the timeline), S.J. Clarkson's "Madame Web" hit theaters on Valentine's Day 2024 and deeply underwhelmed audiences in the process. Not only was it critically panned, but it also absolutely bombed at the box office, throwing yet another nail into the coffin of what was once called "Sony's Spider-Man Universe" or the SSU.

The film stars Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, and Isabela Merced, and the three of them have all moved onto greener pastures (by which I mean critically or even commercially successful projects). So, what does Sweeney think about the movie that now sits comfortably in her filmography right between the massively successful romantic comedy "Anyone But You" and the religious horror flick "Immaculate?"

Sweeney sat down with Empire Magazine for its summer issue and, when interviewer Rebecca Nicholson asked about the superhero flop, Sweeney was incredibly diplomatic. "I mean, I had a really fun time, so that is all that matters to me," Sweeney demurred. "I think that if you are enjoying what you do, it doesn't really matter what the outcome is, on a box office level. Of course, you want the film to be celebrated and loved and successful, because then everyone succeeds."

Sweeney went on to host "Saturday Night Live" in early March 2024 and, during her monologue, she took the smallest of swipes at the box office fortunes of "Madame Web" while discussing her most recent projects. "You might have seen me in 'Anyone But You' or 'Euphoria,'" Sweeney said, before continuing, "You definitely did not see me in 'Madame Web.'" (Based on the box office haul, she's probably not wrong!) Elsewhere in the interview, though, Sweeney revealed that "Madame Web" appealed to her in the first place for some pretty interesting reasons.

Apparently, the reason that Sydney Sweeney agreed to participate in the eventual disaster "Madame Web" is because she wanted to join a major superhero franchise, knowing that it would boost her profile nicely ... and she also wanted to make something for her younger family members.

"It's always fun to be able to be a part of something that's bigger than yourself," Sweeney told Rebecca Nicholson. "I hadn't done a studio film yet, and I had started my production company [Fifty-Fifty Films]. I had some properties that I really wanted to be able to take out to studios, and I needed to be able to get my name to have more value, within a studio household. Doing a project like that really helps you on the market. I also wanted to be able to do something that my cousins can watch. I have a bunch of little teenage cousins, and they don't really understand what I do. I thought it would be so cool to be able to do something that they'd actually think was fun and cool."

All of this makes sense on paper, and I definitely understand why Sweeney thought that "Madame Web" might be helpful and further her career at the end of the day. Unfortunately, as we know, that didn't come to pass ... probably because "Madame Web" is an absolute mess of a movie that feels and looks unfinished, and Sweeney doesn't get to do very much in it when all is said and done. Sweeney is, in my estimation, a very talented actor and she's turning out to be a very shrewd producer, but the little she does get to do in "Madame Web" is, honestly, pretty embarrassing. So why, exactly, is this superhero flick such a punchline?

It is, at this point, a truth universally acknowledged that "Madame Web" is not a good movie. In his review for /Film, Witney Seibold didn't pull any punches, writing, "Admittedly, "Madame Web" is a messy, messy film. Credited to four screenwriters and three story writers, 'Madame Web' is a massive, clunky jumble, replete with some strange editing and pacing that makes it feel like the result of a lot of experimental tinkering." This is accurate, and I'll also add a few more major issues into the mix.

First of all, the film's proximity to "Spider-Man" lore is deeply distracting; its screenwriters seem to have been banned from writing the words "Peter" and "Parker" too close to one another at any point, because even though Adam Scott's character is named Ben and he's seeing a woman named May (and his sister, played by Emma Roberts, is conspicuously pregnant with a baby boy), the movie quite literally never gets specific about this seemingly major plot point. Second, the ADR, or Automated Dialogue Replacement, is absolutely out of control; honestly, did Tahar Rahim, who plays the film's antagonist Ezekiel Sims, deliver any of his lines on set? Or were they all added in post-production? Furthermore, the story makes little to no sense, poor Dakota Johnson is given abhorrent material and spends an inordinate amount of time talking to herself, and the film goes to great lengths to set itself in 2003 while at the same time using songs like Britney Spears' "Toxic," which ... came out in 2004. (Also, it all feels like a giant Pepsi ad.)

I'll stop dunking on "Madame Web" now, but know that I could absolutely do this all day, and it's honestly great to hear that Sydney Sweeney has a good attitude about the whole thing. Sweeney, who's set to return to her role as Cassie Howard in HBO's "Euphoria" and whose film "Eden" premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2024, is doing just fine as both a producer and as an actor, "Madame Web" notwithstanding.

If you want to check it out anyway, "Madame Web" is streaming on Netflix now.