We were receiving bad signals with the promotion of Sony’s first Spider-verse film in 2024, which have been increasing as the premiere approaches (we have seen it in the press only a day before, traditionally a dire omen). For example, very brief trailers that They barely show any action or purely superheroic scenes.. We, the press, have been provided with very little graphic material about the film.
Once you have seen ‘Madame Web’, the reason is obvious: it is not exactly a superhero film, but rather a preview of a hypothetical film of the genre that may never arrive. And it doesn’t look bad, by the way, a team of arachnid superheroines (Spider and two Spider-Women) commanded by Madame Web, with powers of clairvoyance also granted by that totem-for-everything that are spiders in the Marvel Universe.
But none of that is in ‘Madame Web’, an origin story for a supporting Spider-Man character. Clues are given about his universe in the film, by the way, making it clear that this New York is the New York of the future hero -future because we are in 2003, sometimes it seems that only for the purpose of stuffing those tributes-. However, ‘Madame Web’ suffers from the same problems as the rest of Sony’s Spider-Verse. But she points to some other virtue.
For example, and as we already pointed out in our reflections about whether the Spider-Verse could be a forceful and necessary enema for the stagnant superhero genre (in a year in which the panorama of premieres of the genre is going to be practically deserted): it is comforting to come across a film of a certain modesty, focused on an adventure with a beginning and an end. ‘Madame Web’ will be many things, but at least it is not one piece of a chaotic and infinite puzzle of cross-references.
‘Final Destination’ with superheroes
That doesn’t make ‘Madame Web’ a must-see movie in the superhero movie landscape. With rhythm ups and downs galore, it easily sits somewhere in the middle above the dreadful ‘Morbius’ and below both ‘Venom’. Dakota Johnson, although she does a competent job, He doesn’t seem to have much fun with this job.and cannot match the overwhelming charisma of Tom Hardy.
However, there are very interesting aspects in it and that, we insist, come from its assumed modesty of a blockbuster with the spirit of a B series. For example, the visualization of the possible futures that the protagonist lives have more of an aesthetic discovery and exude a kind of ‘Final Destination’ atmosphere which, overall, ends up being the best thing about the film.
The forecasts are not too good for Sony, which points to weak collections of 25 million dollars on this long weekend with a party in the United States. It is expected to not even be the most watched movie of the weekend, and it will be surpassed by the Bob Marley biopic. The first of, perhaps, several setbacks in 2024 for Sony’s superhero universe.
The big enigma now is knowing when Sony will get tired of trying to overshadow Marvel with much fewer resources. It is inevitable that ‘Madame Web’, with its shamelessness when it comes to proposing a superhero movie without superheroes, will be liked by those of us who are fed up with the vacuous bombast and excesses of Marvel and DC, but that way it doesn’t raise a billion of dollars at the box office.
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