Being a Sony Pictures Executive must be wild. Imagine, you wake up on silk sheets with a pounding hangover, blow your nose and grimace at the crimson residue on the tissue. You clear your throat and yell down to the maid, demanding a Bloody Mary to take the edge off. As you trudge down your marble staircase you check your messages and shudder, realizing that at some point during last night’s amphetamine binge you somehow greenlit yet another Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man in it.
“Who the hell is Madame Web?” you mutter. A cursory glance at Wikipedia and your heart sinks: “Madame Web is an elderly woman with a debilitating neuromuscular condition connected to a life support system resembling a spiderweb.”
“I’m gonna need an extra shot in that Bloody Mary. And get me the guys who wrote Morbius!“
Two years later and now we’re all suffering that hangover as Madame Web shamefacedly tiptoes into theaters. Sony Pictures knows it’s terrible. The cast is mortified. And now the critics have turned in their verdict:
Let’s take an overview: “Laughably bad“, “the worst Marvel film ever made“, “a mess of a movie it doesn’t even qualify as a “it’s so bad it’s good”“, “bad in ways even debacles like Catwoman and Batman & Robin never broached“, “a genuine Chernobyl-level disaster that seems to get exponentially more radioactive as it goes along“.
So, let’s get to the morbillion-dollar question. Does Madame Web make Morbius look like The Dark Knight? Now, Morbius and Madame Web look as if they’ll end up with roughly the same Rotten Tomatoes score, with Morb on 15% and Mads on 17% (as of writing). So, by that factor alone they’re both as bad as each other, and therefore equally distant from The Dark Knight, which sits pretty at 94%.
But let’s look beyond the score to the factor that matters right now: how funny is the online reaction? Morbius is an all-timer here and even two years later “It’s Morbin’ time!” still puts a smile on my face. This avalanche of negative social interest was so powerful it convinced Sony Pictures to re-release the movie (a decision likely reached with the help of a delivery from the execs’ friends in Bolivia). It’s going to be difficult to top that.
Madame Web started its meme game strong, with the trailers giving us the immortal line “he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died”. Tragically it appears this line isn’t in the actual movie (Sony! You idiots!) and, right now, Madame Web looks like it isn’t going to launch anything close to the tidal wave of hilarity that arrived alongside Morbius.
Meanwhile, Heath Ledger’s Joker has launched a million image macros and continues to be a social media icon sixteen long years on from its release. And that’s even leaving aside the many “You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain.” references that continue to pop up in online arguments.
So, to conclude, in terms of outright cinematic quality, Madame Web does not make Morbius look like The Dark Knight. But in terms of memes, we think Morbius and The Dark Knight stand at one end of the spectrum and Madame Web way over on the other.
There you have it, Madame Web isn’t just bad, it doesn’t even have the decency to be funny about it.
