Sydney Sweeney turns 26 today, and what a meteoric rise the actress has had in the last couple of years; from The Handmaid’s Tale to Euphoria to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and now the upcoming Madame Web, Sweeney has long since established herself as one of Hollywood’s most prominent young stars today. Of course, few can get where the now-26-year-old has gotten without a few wince-worthy stepping stones.
One of those stepping stones was Spiders 3D, a monster movie in which Sweeney had a major role as a girl named Emily, the daughter of a representative of New York City’s Department of Health. And if that woefully generic title and gimmick plug doesn’t set off your Spidey-Sense to how bad this movie is, we don’t know what will.
Indeed, Spiders 3D managed to rack up a measly 11% approval rating from both critics and audiences on Rotten Tomatoes, earned through a combination of dire dialogue, atrocious plotting, and special effects that makes one’s skin crawl, and not in the way a movie about giant spiders should.
Of course, it’s not completely offensive, as its intention of being mindless monster movie fare is one that it wears on its sleeve without any fear, and it’s quite the benchmark for looking back on Sweeney’s career to see just how far she’s come in the last decade.
All we need now is for Sweeney to summon the Spiders 3D monsters as Madame Web, and we’ll have come full circle in the most egregiously 2020s-cinema way possible.
