Madame Webb was MURDERED by attention-seeking, self-appointed, agenda-driven arbiters of taste!
Why we shouldn't always believe what we read! Let's all learn to be critical thinkers.
Madame Webb, the latest Marvel comic book to be given the big screen treatment, has been unleashed. Sadly, however, for all those involved, the reviews have been atrocious and box office figures are an all-time low for a Marvel movie.
Not one to let a bad review put me off - Grease 2 and Showgirls are two of my favourite films - I ventured out to catch the flick for myself. And do you know what? It wasn’t half bad! Sure, it was schlocky and super camp, a little absurd in places, but that’s what made the movie all the more fun. It reminded me of the fantastic Christopher Reeve Superman movies I grew up watching in the 80s.
In recent years superhero films have become so po-faced, SFX-heavy and overlong that it was an absolute pleasure to settle back and go on an unadulterated, popcorn rollercoaster ride.
So why did the movie tank so spectacularly?
For one, I think we’re all suffering from superhero fatigue. There have been so many comic book movies and TV series released over the past ten years that all look the same and are all weighed down with complex, convoluted storylines that run across various IPs at once. It takes up too much brain power for some of us to follow and boredom ultimately sets in.
But while this is probably the main reason these films have not fared so well at the box office, I also think there is also a more insidious game at play.
I’m an enthusiastic viewer of various YouTube channels that critique films. Some of the content makers, like Dead Meat’s James A Janisse, are spot on with their hot takes and I tune in regularly to hear what they have to say because I can rely on them to be balanced and open-minded.
But recently, I’ve noticed that more and more of these online critics don’t just review a movie, they attack it and lash out at the studios and writers for certain choices they make. The current charge is that ‘Woke Hollywood’ is destroying its legacy properties with identity politics.
It occurred when Disney announced its upcoming live action version of Snow White, when the bedroom-dwellers got their knickers in a twist about the casting of Latina actress Rachel Zegler in the lead role. Apparently that wasn’t authentic to the original 1937 cartoon, and many right-leaning critics were riled. Things got worse, when in red carpet interviews, Rachel declared that she felt the original animated classic was dated and that her new version was all about female empowerment and that Snow White didn’t need a prince to set her free. This comment was like a red rag to a bull. Rachel was slated for daring to criticise the Disney classic and trashed for being complicit in swapping out a beloved storyline for identity politics.
Disney were also slammed by ‘fans’ for ‘’wrecking’ the latest instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise by introducing Phoebe Waller Bridge’s “insufferable” action character Helena Shaw, whose energy and wily ways made old Indy look like a geriatric. The online attacks were ferocious and the film tanked at the box office.
At the tail end of last year another comic book movie, The Marvels, was mauled by various content makers weeks before it even reached cinemas, who predicted that a female led superhero movie, helmed by a supposedly ‘inexperienced’ director – and a woman of colour, as so many of them were keen to point out – would fail at the box office. Sadly for all involved, it did.
However, I don’t necessarily think it was the quality of the film that put people off seeing it. I think the incessant barrage of negative online articles and vlogs that preceded its release played an integral role in its downfall. These self-appointed, agenda-driven arbiters of taste have such large followings and influence, that it seems that by spouting off to their thousands of followers about why they think a film is a total disaster, they can actually make or break a project.
Recently, various online movie critics were up in arms when Disney announced that feminist documentary film maker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy had been chosen to direct the upcoming Rey-focused movie Star Wars: A New Jedi Order. They raged that she wasn’t qualified for the job and were even less happy when she declared upon her appointment that “it's about time that we had a woman come forward to shape a story in a galaxy far, far away.”
Of course, there’s nothing wrong with folks being critical about what they see or read, it’s everybody’s right to do so. But comments should be constructive and have merit, not simply be an excuse to instigate nasty pile-ons, or in the case of YouTubers, post mean-spirited rants that they know will ruffle feathers and get shares and ultimately gain new subscribers. Creators know that if they say something controversial and critical - regardless of whether they actually believe it or not - they will gain more views and more revenue.
But dumping on a film or its director before shooting even begins, signals that these critics are not authentic and come armed with an agenda from the outset. And that is a problem.
In the lead up to the release of Madame Webb, various online personalities had set it in their sights and tried to convince their viewers that it was destined for disaster. First they slammed the idea of a female led superhero movie ever working and then to add fuel to the fire, they took interview quotes from its star out of context to create stories that suggested all was not well on set!
In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Dakota Johnson explained how working in front of a bluescreen for the first time on the movie had been a ’psychotic’ experience, explaining, “I’ve never really done a movie where you are on a bluescreen, and there’s fake explosions going off, and someone’s going, ‘Explosion!’ and you act like there’s an explosion. That to me was absolutely psychotic. I was like, ‘I don’t know if this is going to be good at all! I hope that I did an OK job!’ But I trusted [director S.J. Clarkson]. She works so hard, and she has not taken her eyes off this movie since we started.”
The headlines that followed implied that making the movie was a lot more intense than it was. Even well-respected broadsheet The Independent dumbed down to run a piece headlined ‘Dakota Johnson says she had initial worries about superhero movie Madame Webb’. Clearly from what she actually said, she was simply expressing her nerves at working with bluescreen for the first time.
Misleading headlines come as no surprise - we see them everywhere, even in mainstream media - but in this day and age, when few people rarely read past the headlines and accept them as absolute truth, it can be highly damaging and a frightening development in exercising criticism because it can scare off an entire unquestioning audience.
Even before the film hit screens, the movie was predicted to fail. When its trailer dropped, critics took great pleasure - and indeed a lot of time - to scrutinise almost every frame of it, poking fun at its supposedly bad editing and clunky dialogue. One particular line that had the creators in a spin was the premise-setting, “he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders just before she died”. True, there is a lot of detail in that short sentence, but it’s certainly not the worst line of dialogue to be uttered in a movie. And yet it was deemed so atrocious it become a viral meme and led content creators to declare the film a ‘dumpster fire’. Even The Guardian newspaper ran a whole article about how awful its writer thought the trailer was, focusing in particular on the now notorious line of dialogue - that doesn’t appear in the film..
In an interview with Huffington Post, Dakota was asked about how the line had become such a talking point, to which she simply looked at the journalist bemused and asked, “Why did that go viral?” When he explained that “out of context, people were just like, ‘what does that mean?’” she replied, “but isn’t any sentence out of context… out of context,” adding, “What a silly thing.” Boom!
Honestly, take a look at the trailer for yourselves. Is it really worse than any other teaser clip you’ve ever seen? I, for one, couldn’t wait for the film to come out after seeing it.
But the critics weren’t satisfied. Those mean-spirited creators were hungry for more ammo to hurl at the film and once again got creative with their storytelling. When Dakota tagged Marvel and Sony Pictures in a social media post and then deleted it soon after (along with years of other posts too) online sleuths believed she had done so because she had been duped into thinking she was part of the hugely successful MCU and not just a Sony Pictures Spider-Man spin-off. Of course, this wasn’t true. But why let facts get in the way of a juicy conspiracy?
A week later, Dakota announced she had switched talent agencies and once again creators let their minds run wild to further add fuel to the fire that Madame Webb was bag of shizzle. They suggested that she had fired her old firm WME in favour of CAA because she was furious that they’d lumbered her with a dud movie. In actual fact, her new agency had agreed to rep both her and her production company, TeaTime Pictures, who was making her indie film, Daddio, a movie set to be released by Sony Pictures Classics.
But there was more…
Just before the film opened, Dakota was asked to host huge US telly show Saturday Night Live in which she made the sarky - and scripted - remark that Madame Webb was “like if AI had made your boyfriend’s favourite movie.” While most people considered it a funny, tongue in cheek quip, referring to its cast being comprised of eye-pleasing actresses like gorgeous Sydney Sweeney, the naysayers were fast to point out that disgruntled Dakota was actually throwing shade at her own movie. This notion was given further credence when during her run of promo interviews, she admitted she still hadn’t seen the film and was unlikely to. Salivating doomster critics took this to mean Dakota hated the film and was embarrassed to see it.
Of course, the truth was slightly different. It appears that she rarely watches any of her films back because she is overly critical of her performances.
When Madame Webb finally hit theatres, reviews were scathing, with hardly any critics finding anything nice to say. But then, that was their intention. They were never looking to find positives. They wanted to revel in it supposed dreadfulness. In reality, it was a fun, albeit vacuous, high-octane adventure, with funny jokes, some truly scary moments and an intriguing premise that paramedic Cassie Webb can see into the near future.
But these critics were not satisfied with that. As far as they were concerned, it was the worst film ever made. (It really isn’t!) Sure, there were some ADR dubbing issues, but if you watch or read a lot of the reviews, some of the criticisms were just petty. One outlet piled on the film to make a point that the filmmakers were too heavy handed in establishing that the story takes place in 2003 by including a “lingering” shot of a Blockbuster shop front! In actual fact it’s seen fleetingly in the background of a shot when Cassie whizzes past it in her ambulance.
The same outlet also made a song and dance about the fact that Britney Spears’ Toxic was played on a car radio, once again accusing the filmmakers of shamefully over-stating the year. They also went to great pains to explain that the track wasn’t actually released as a single until 2004, even though it appeared on the 2003-released In The Zone album. I can’t for the life of me understand why this is such a big deal. These are just subtle ways of letting the viewer know when the action is taking place. Emerald Fennell did the same thing on the soundtrack to her 2007-set Saltburn and nobody seemed to bat an eyelid.
Other critics questioned the credibility of the storyline, wondering how Cassie was able to find the Peruvian Spider People so easily during her trip to the Amazon on her hunt for answers about her mother’s demise and her clairvoyant powers. They also slammed the lack of back story that would explain how she was transported from Peru as a baby to New York. Fair questions, but this is a superhero movie, one in which our main protagonist has other-worldly superpowers. Logic isn’t necessary. Unless it’s a very straight narrative. Fantasy films are different. These movies are not supposed to make sense half the time. We are expected to suspend our disbelief. Afterall, in Edward Scissorhands, was our enjoyment of the classic movie ruined because we wondered where the hell Edward got those large blocks of ice from to carve his sculptures at the end of the film? Of course not.
So why do these bedroom-dwellers derive so much pleasure from rubbishing movies and attacking the studios, writers and stars who make them? It’s clearly not to offer their subscribers an honest review as they approach a film with an angle - usually negative - even before they see it. These ‘critics’ are not in the game to share balanced opinions. It’s all performative. They rage and dismantle creative people and their endeavours to be outrageous, to convince people that they know better than everyone else, to win views and to make money. In my mind, they are no better than the bile-spewing trolls who lurk on X.
They might argue their opinions are fair game. And yes, they have every right to share their views. But when they have an agenda that is so damaging, it really isn’t fair on the filmmakers, the actors or the people who actually do like the film.
I, for one, am furious that because of the atrocious box office figures Madame Webb has achieved – though I won’t give the trolls full credit for its demise - Sony has decided it’s not worth pursuing a follow up, which is sad, because I was really excited about seeing all the girls suited up and fighting crime in a sequel. Oh well! I’ll just have to dream. Or wait for a reboot in ten years time.
All I ask is for online critics and media agencies desperate for views and controversy, to be kind and fair. Say what you think works and doesn’t work, but let’s not get personal or try to discredit a film or its team just for clicks. It ruins it for every one.