[COLUMN] Forget the Movie, the Madame Web Press Tour is Already an All-Timer | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Madame Web is released in cinemas this week. However the film itself plays out, the Madame Web press tour has been a highlight of the year to date.

Madame Web is the latest entry in Sony Pictures’ attempts to construct a shared comic book movie universe around its rights to the Spider-Man characters, albeit one largely without Spider-Man (Tom Holland) himself. Even Sony seems confused. In its own weird way, the company’s attempts to build a billion-dollar mega-franchise out of C-tier Spider-Man-adjacent brands like Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunt is a piece of intellectual property performance art worthy of Matthew Vaughn.

Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra “Cassie” Webb, an extremely niche comic book character who has the power to glimpse possible futures. This inevitably leads her to fight Ezekial Sims (Tahar Rahim), a villain with a suspiciously Spider-Man-like costume, as she puts together a team of spider-themed superheroines (Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, and Isabela Merced). However, the plot of the movie is largely unimportant and incidental.

Last year, Hollywood found itself swept up in two historical labor stoppages. The actors’ strike in particular halted many multimedia press tours, as performers were unable to get out and promote the films that they had made. To a certain extent, it’s possible to argue this wasn’t the worst thing in the world. It allowed movies to stand on their own merits as self-contained work. A lot of movie publicity is vapid and banal, carefully rehearsed and stage-managed white noise.

However, every once in a while, there is a press tour that reminds audiences of how important actors actually are, and that it is occasionally possible for a media cycle to revolve around more than studio-sanctioned small-talk deftly navigating non-disclosure agreements and potential controversy like a minesweeper in the Black Sea. Sometimes, the stars align. In those rare cases, the industry is in enough chaos and a performer is so candid that no studio publicist is strong enough to keep the press tour on-message.

Dakota Johnson’s press tour for Madame Web has been delightful in every way that a press tour can be delightful. Johnson is refreshingly disinterested in toeing the company line, in repeating platitudes about her work on the Marvel-adjacent property being “life-changing” or “a dream come true.” Instead, Johnson’s vibe in talking about the movie has been endearingly frank. Of course, Johnson’s never been rude or unprofessional about the film, but she hasn’t been reverential of it.

During her second stint hosting Saturday Night Live, she joked that Madame Web was “kind of like if AI generated your boyfriend’s perfect movie.” Selling the project on Late Night With Seth Meyers, she had no interest in its place in comic book movie canon, boasting, “You don’t need to know anything at all to watch this movie.” Asked which superheroes she would like to team up with, she didn’t even feign awareness of popular characters in the genre, stating, “I don’t know who those heroes are, but I’ll take them.”

The lazy take on Johnson’s press tour would be to argue that she clearly dislikes Madame Web, and cannot be bothered to muster any fake enthusiasm to promote it. However, that feels reductive and dismissive, bending Johnson’s attitude to fit a predetermined internet narrative around the film. It seems fairer to suggest that Johnson is simply being honest in a way that actors on the circuit rarely are, promoting the movie while refusing to feign excitement about the larger corporate brand.

Indeed, a lot of Johnson’s comments aren’t uniquely applicable to Madame Web. They reflect the experience of any actor making these sorts of modern blockbusters. “I’ve never really done a movie where you are on a blue screen, and there’s fake explosions going off, and someone’s going, ‘Explosion!’ and you act like there’s an explosion,” she admitted. “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 okay job!’” That’s just what making these sorts of movies is now.

At times, Johnson’s press tour has felt like the actor is slyly engaging with the modern hype and publicity machine, not to mention internet journalism. When an interviewer from The Huffington Post pressed her on an infamously viral line from the Madame Web trailer, Johnson weathered it like a professional, politely and firmly turning the tables to ask the question, “Why did that go viral?” This was a moment of meta-virality, as the interview clip itself went viral.

It was a moment that recalled Sandra Bullock’s acceptance speech for her Worst Actress statue for All About Steve at the Golden Raspberry Awards. It’s a performer flipping an attempt at public humiliation back on the journalists responsible. Without seeming confrontational, Johnson politely refused to laugh along with the joke at her expense, and instead asked the journalist interviewing her to explain it to her face. He, naturally, stumbles. It’s a beautiful illustration of the vapidity of so much of this sort of press.

Johnson also discussed the larger industry. “I am discovering that it’s really fucking bleak in this industry,” she told L’Officiel. “It is majorly disheartening. The people who run streaming platforms don’t trust creative people or artists to know what’s going to work, and that is just going to make us implode. It’s really heartbreaking. It’s just fucking so hard. It’s so hard to get anything made. All of the stuff I’m interested in making is really different, and it’s unique and it’s very forward in whatever it is.”

The lazy read on this is that it’s a passive-aggressive dunk on the fact that she is making a Spider-Man movie without Spider-Man. However, she is talking about larger forces. She was ostensibly discussing Daddio, a film she made with director Christy Hall. However, it’s hard to imagine she wasn’t thinking about Am I OK?, a film that she made with Tig Notaro and Stephanie Allynne. It sold to Warners in January 2022 for a streaming release on Max, but remains undated more than two years later.

To put it frankly, this is a much more interesting press tour than most blockbusters allow. It’s far more compelling than watching Taika Waititi casually trash overworked visual effects workers for a cheap laugh. It has much more substance than Tom Holland grumbling that Martin Scorsese “doesn’t know what it’s like” to make a Marvel movie, and so doesn’t have any right to criticize them. It’s an open and honest reflection of how fundamentally broken the industry is at this moment.

In some ways, this harks back to an older style of celebrity publicity, where actors talked with much greater candor about their work. Harrison Ford is perhaps the patron saint of this approach, responding to questions about Star Wars mythology by stating, “I have no fucking idea what a Force ghost is. And I don’t care!” Ford hasn’t really softened in his later years, reportedly rallying his Captain America: Brave New Worlds co-stars by declaring, “Let’s shoot this piece of shit.”

Of course, that sort of frankness has become the exception rather than the rule. As Alden Ehrenreich, who took over from Ford as Han Solo in Solo: A Star Wars Story, conceded of talking about how much he enjoyed making Oppenheimer, “It’s great when you don’t have to fucking lie about this shit.” He’s right, and it is great that Dakota Johnson doesn’t have to lie about her experiences in the industry, particularly when so much press for these movies has become so banal.

There are several reasons why Johnson enjoys more freedom than many of her contemporaries to talk about this stuff. Madame Web is a Sony production, and so its publicity is less tightly controlled than a Disney production would be. Further, the cultural cachet of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (and, as such, of superhero brands in general) has been greatly diminished in recent years. This makes it possible to talk honestly and openly about these films and their place in the industry.

More than that, Johnson has a history of speaking her mind to establishment and industry figures. In November 2019, Johnson frankly called out Ellen DeGeneres’ narrative about not receiving an invite to Johnson’s 30th birthday, with seven simple words: “Actually, no – that’s not the truth, Ellen.” Incidentally, this was just a few months before The Ellen DeGeneres Show would be rocked by serious allegations of misconduct that led to the chat show’s end.

There may be another reason that Johnson feels comfortable talking about these realities in a way that her younger Madame Web co-stars do not. Johnson is the daughter of Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith. Though Johnson dismisses the “nepo baby” discourse as “just lame”, she is very firmly integrated into the larger industry. The movie star might be dead, killed in part by the sort of intellectual property that Johnson is promoting, but Johnson is still Hollywood royalty.

Johnson’s Madame Web co-star Sydney Sweeney has talked openly about the precarious nature of her celebrity and stardom, how she doesn’t have the financial security to cover even “a six-month break” necessary to start a family. This ties back into the systemic issues that Johnson has talked about, with Sweeney acknowledging that the studios “don’t pay actors like they used to, and with streamers, you no longer get residuals.” This is why endorsements are such a big deal for young stars.

The past few years have seen the power in Hollywood shift away from movie stars and celebrities. Actors like Sweeney cannot afford to talk as openly about the business as veterans like Ford or second-generation performers like Johnson. It’s easy to understand why Hollywood has eagerly replaced movie stars with intellectual property. Spider-Man is a more appealing star than Dakota Johnson, because Spider-Man is less likely to talk openly about how broken the industry has become.

Of course, there are issues with the movie star system. It’s certainly fair to be skeptical of individuals earning (and inheriting) that much money and influence. However, the system replacing them doesn’t feel like an improvement. However the film itself plays out, the Madame Web press tour has been a refreshing showcase for the kind of movie publicity cycle that doesn’t really exist anymore, where an actor offers more than just adoring and generic soundbites about some gigantic brand.

It's a little funny that Disney’s big superhero gamble this year is Deadpool 3, starring Ryan Reynolds, a movie built around a character and a performer who cultivate an air of irreverence. Given how much Disney has riding on that film, it seems likely the press cycle will be carefully controlled and managed. It’s a shame, because Deadpool 3 could learn something about the power of irreverence from Dakota Johnson.