The superhero genre is delicate in the eyes of general audiences and fans alike. The wrong filmmaker behind a project can turn what could be a slam dunk into a disaster. Or, in the case of someone like the Russo brothers, Captain America was a character they didn’t quite find interesting at first, so their goal was to make him fresher and more interesting for viewers similar to them, and in the end, The Winter Soldier became a top-tier movie in many Marvel fans’ rankings. However, when a movie doesn’t end up as an actor might hope, they sometimes attempt to disassociate from the infamy.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, star of the upcoming Superman, Rachel Brosnahan, says actors should stand by their work. Brosnahan recently had a talk with acting peer Amanda Seyfried for Interview Magazine, where Seyfried started, “That’s the thing about these movies: You can feel it when people are doing it with passion and grace and curiosity.” The new Lois Lane would reply, “
I don’t know why people say yes [to a project] only to then turn around and complain about it. Look, I don’t want to shit on other actors, but there was a minute where it was cool to not like superhero movies and to look back on projects like this and pooh-pooh them. Do it or don’t do it, and then stand by it.”
A big recent example would be Madam Web, which had garnered a lot of meme attention from the internet when the trailers showed how the movie was being executed for the big screen, i.e., the line, “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.” One of the film’s stars, Sydney Sweeney, admitted it was a “one for them” job, while Dakota Johnson stated that the quality of the movie wasn’t her fault. She explained, “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.”
