‘A new king has been crowned’: An absolutely savage meme shows ‘Madame Web’ passing the ‘Worst Movie of 2024’ torch to a cinematic calamity

What do you get when you cross an excellently made movie with Hollywood’s ridiculous compulsion of capitalizing on IPs and making as many sequels as the box office returns warrant them to make? You get what you [redacted] deserve!

When I finally sat down to watch Madame Web earlier this year — and not in a theater, mind you— the movie constantly reminded me of a famous quote by Roger Ebert. “If you have to ask what it symbolizes, it didn’t.” You might think that I was thrown off by the dreadful dialogue, the extremely generic premise, or the borderline nonsensical MacGuffins that kept pushing the plot to where it needed to go. You might even assume that much like the rest of the audience (and it’s indeed rare that we cinephiles can find a lynchpin of such unanimous proportions as Madame Web) I found the barely-enthusiastic acting by the cast laughable and utterly ruinous to the film’s bare allusions to a suspension of disbelief.

But the simple truth of it is, Madame Web simply coalesced all my feelings about the industry into a very entertaining 2-hour ride. Entertaining for the fact that it was so bad I actually started to enjoy myself from a certain point on. Probably about the same time as when the cast gave up all attempts at taking this seriously.

The point is, it’s extremely difficult to drop the ball so hard that it starts bouncing around the arena and sends shock waves across the entire industry, once again making everyone question if Hollywood should just call it quits with this superhero filmmaking business. And then you realize they actually managed to do it twice in the same year. Enter Joker: Folie à Deux, a film so terrible that one critic described the experience of watching it as taking “a knife to the gut.”

Joker: Folie à Deux currently holds a 33% rotten rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 45 out of 100 on Metacritic, turning it into one of the worst superhero or drama films in recent memory. And while that’s not exactly as low as Madame Web stooped, Todd Phillips somehow managed to take one of the most beloved DC films of the past two decades and with a sequel steal Madame Web‘s thunder as the worst movie of 2024 that lacks even that ironic entertainment value.

This unasked-for sequel is turning into a flop thanks to the scathing reviews, already being hailed as a worse commercial disaster than The Marvels. Say what you will about Madame Web, but at least with that plot, I could understand why I hated everything that came on the screen. With Joker: Folie à Deux, it seems, you’re mostly confused and wondering when this fever dream is going to end. Any chance Phillips and Phoenix may have had to build on the acclaimed social commentary of the original film was lost the moment they decided to go full musical.

That said, let’s not be too hasty in bestowing Joker 2 with the crown of the worst 2024 film just yet. We still have, after all, Venom: The Last Dance to look forward to in late October, and something tells me that the threequel is going to be even worse than the first two installments.