When failure being an orphan meets spiders having 100 babies, you get Madame Web. When the movie was released last year as part of Sony’s consistently terrible Spider-Man Universe, it was a complete flop, taking in just $15 million of its $100 million budget, a number it would never recoup. And while fingers could be pointed everywhere (and they have been), it’s always interesting to see the stars lay their own backlash in a movie they devoted months to. Leading that yet again is Dakota Johnson, who has been one of the most vocal about Madame Web failing to find its audience.
Dakota Johnson recently spoke to the Los Angeles Times, where Madame Web – which may haunt her for the rest of her career – was brought up. To start off, she wanted to make one thing very clear: “It wasn’t my fault.” She added, “There’s this thing that happens now where a lot of creative decisions are made by committee. Or made by people who don’t have a creative bone in their body. And it’s really hard to make art that way. Or to make something entertaining that way. And I think unfortunately with ‘Madame Web,’ it started out as something and turned into something else. And I was just sort of along for the ride at that point. But that happens. Bigger-budget movies fail all the time.”
Dakota Johnson would go on to say of Madame Web, “I don’t have a Band-Aid over it. There’s no part of me that’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll never do that again’ to anything,’” although this is in direct conflict with something she told Bustle one month after Madame Web came out.
By and large, Dakota Johnson looks to be untangling herself from Madame Web by focusing on smaller films, doing Splitsville (which debuted at Cannes this year), co-leading Celine Song’s Past Lives follow-up Materialists and starring in Michael Showalter’s thriller Verity.
If Dakota Johnson says she’s not at fault for the failure of Madame Web, who is? At what point did the production go wrong? Give us your thoughts in the comments section below.
