[COLUMN] Madame Web is a Spider-Man Nativity | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

When the time comes to write the history of the comic book movie boom, the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters (SPUMC) will make a fascinating case study of how the shared universe model impacted mainstream blockbuster filmmaking. The latest entry in that sub-franchise, Madame Web, is an interesting illustration of the compulsions and contradictions that shape modern superhero tent poles. It might just be the only interesting thing about Madame Web.

In March 1999, Sony paid a $10 million advance to secure the rights to adapt Spider-Man for the big screen. Reportedly, Sony had the opportunity to buy the entire slate of Marvel characters for $25 million, but turned it down. Nevertheless, Sony pressed ahead with a Spider-Man movie directed by Sam Raimi, which – along with Bryan Singer’s X-Men and Stephen Norrington’s Blade – helped to kickstart the modern superhero movie boom.

Sam Raimi wrapped up his Spider-Man trilogy in 2007. The following year, Marvel Studios would launch its own series of movies with Jon Favreau’s Iron Man. However, this franchise would not be a series of direct sequels. It would be a complex interlocked narrative that tied several sub-franchises together, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The follow-ups to Iron Man weren’t just Iron Man 2 and Iron Man 3, but The Incredible Hulk, Thor, and Captain America: The First Avenger.

It was an insanely lucrative model. The Avengers, the studio’s first massive crossover, became the highest-grossing film of 2012, the year that Sony struggled to launch its wall-crawling reboot, Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man. The MCU went on to become the highest-grossing film franchise in history. Other companies looked to Marvel Studios with envious eyes, each wanting a shared universe of their own using whatever they could dig out of their toy chest.

Sony were lucky enough to have a property that was Marvel-adjacent. Of course, they were unlucky enough that it was insanely hyper-focused. Within the MCU, each brand – Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and so-on – could interlock to form a greater whole. However, Sony only had access to Spider-Man. That meant that they effectively had to turn what would have been one small corner of Marvel Studios’ shared universe into its own shared universe.

There was another problem. Following the failure to launch Webb’s Amazing Spider-Man duology, Sony needed to reboot their Spider-Man brand again. This time, they did it with the assistance of Marvel Studios. Jon Watts’ Spider-Man trilogy would take place inside the MCU, and Marvel Studios would have the freedom to use that version of the character, played by Tom Holland, in crossover films like Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

This deal worked out reasonably well for both parties. Tellingly, the only two MCU films to gross over a billion dollars since Endgame were Spider-Man: Far From Home and Spider-Man: No Way Home, which were technically Sony productions. However, this created something of a logistical problem for Sony’s larger Spider-Man shared universe. If Spider-Man was part of the MCU, then who was the central figure of the SPUMC?

This led to a bizarre situation where Sony ended up building a shared universe of Spider-Man-adjacent characters that somehow did not include Spider-Man himself. So far, the studio has released Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius, and Madame Web, with Kraven the Hunter dated for later this year. The studio has also tried and failed to get a Sinister Six movie made, which would focus on a team of Spider-Man villains.

To be fair to Sony, the results have been a mixed bag. Critical reception for these films hasn’t been particularly enthusiastic, but the Venom franchise has been lucrative. Ruben Fleischer’s Venom grossed $856 million worldwide, almost as much as James Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 did the previous year. Andy Serkis’ Let There Be Carnage significantly outgrossed its closest MCU competitor, Chloé Zhao’s Eternals. On the other hand, Daniel Espinosa’s Morbius flopped – twice.

However, these movies are fascinating objects just conceptually. They are built around established intellectual property that is fundamentally tied to Spider-Man, but they can never actually feature Spider-Man himself. This is most obvious with Venom (Tom Hardy), a character who is essentially derived from how cool it looked when Spider-Man wore a black costume. The Sinister Six are a collection of villains who initially teamed up to defeat Spider-Man.

This is the central ordering principle of Madame Web, as much as Madame Web can be said to have a centering ordering principle. It is a film built around the mythology of the Spider-Man franchise, a movie about destiny and prophecy structured around the web-slinging wonder. For all that Deadpool 3 finds Wade Wilson (Ryan Reynolds) pitching himself as “Marvel Jesus”, Madame Web is best understood as an attempt to build a nativity myth around Peter Benjamin Parker, the boy who would be Spider-Man.

The standard Spider-Man origin story is relatively straightforward, to the point that audiences were arguably tired of it by The Amazing Spider-Man. Everybody is familiar with the standard beats of the story, to the point that Spider-Man: Homecoming could skip over it and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse could play around with it. Of course, it also exerts a gravity, to the point that Spider-Man: No Way Home, the third film in Jon Watts’ trilogy, weirdly feels like an origin story in its own way.

The beats are straightforward. Peter Parker is a nerdy kid who gets bitten by a radioactive spider that grants him superpowers, and the death of his Uncle Ben leads him to understand some variation on the concept that “with great power there must also come -- great responsibility.” It’s simple. It’s snappy. It’s easy to understand. So, inevitably, comic book mythology starts to build around it and retrofit ideas into it – the backstory of Peter’s parents or the idea of “Spider-Totems.”

Madame Web is essentially an entire movie dedicated to mythologizing the Spider-Man franchise. It does this in a broad sense, building a back story about magical spiders and a hidden tribe of “Spider-People” living in the Peruvian Amazon. Paramedic Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson) is granted the power to see the future because her mother (Kerry Bishé) was bitten by such a spider shortly before giving birth. However, the film’s other ties are much more direct.

The villainous Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) is haunted by prophecy, convinced that he will be killed by three Spider-themed superheroines: Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Mattie Franklin (Celeste O'Connor), and Anya Corazon (Isabela Merced). Although Spider-Man himself does not appear in the film – despite rumors that Sony had planned a cameo – the presence of three spandex-clad spider-themed superheroes evokes the wall-crawler, as does Sims’ supervillain costume. Julia describes him as “like… a spider… person.”

These costumes are never explained within the world of the film. Why does Sims need a cool spider-themed murder suit, particularly given that he seems to enjoy walking around New York barefoot? Why do Cornwall, Franklin, and Corazon all theme their future costumes around spiders, surely they have their own identities? These choices only really make sense outside the narrative, if the audience understands that this is a Spider-Man movie, despite the complete lack of Spider-Man himself.

However, Madame Web goes even further. Cassandra's partner is Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Ben’s sister-in-law, Mary (Emma Roberts), is pregnant. Although the film makes a point of cutting short a scene where Mary Parker reveals the name of her son-to-be, Madame Web lays it on thick. “Ben is really looking forward to being an Uncle,” Cassandra states at one point, for the cheap seats. This is a story about the birth of Spider-Man, but which also cannot directly acknowledge Spider-Man.

There were rumors that Madame Web was intended to be a Terminator­-esque riff on the Spider-Man concept, in which Sims would try to murder Mary Parker to prevent her son from defeating him. The climax of the movie is still built around a superhero throwdown in which Ben frantically drives Mary to the hospital as Sims hunts Cornwall, Franklin, and Corazon. Given how much of Rahim’s dialogue has been ADR-ed, it’s entirely possible the storyline was entirely rewritten in post production to focus on the three teenage girls.

Madame Web is a Spider-Man movie in which Cassandra is positioned as John the Baptist, paving the way for the arrival of the world’s most popular superhero. Indeed, this reflects one of the existential preoccupations of modern superhero media, like The Flash or Secret Invasion, in which these gigantic tent poles are largely built around asserting nothing more than the value of this intellectual property, assuring audiences (and shareholders) that these heroes aren’t just good. They are necessary.

Cassandra’s character arc is towards reconciling her place in this larger canon. She is initially angry at her mother for risking her life to investigate magical spider-mythology, even uttering the line, “I hope the spiders were worth it, mom.” She later finds herself tasked with babysitting three future spider-themed superheroes who are - to quote Deadpool 2 - “tough, morally flexible, and young enough so they can carry this franchise for ten to twelve years.” Naturally, Cassandra ends up reconciling with both her mother and surrogate daughters.

Madame Web is about a character who can see the future value of an intellectual property. The film is obsessed with mythology and lore for its own sake. At one point in the middle of the movie, while Sims is still hunting these three teenage girls, Cassandra drops them off with Ben so she can travel to Peru and receive several extended monologues’-worth of exposition from a wiseman of the spider tribe (José María Yazpik). It’s unclear whether this takes Cassandra hours or days. It doesn’t matter.

Madame Web is built around a mythology with a hole in the middle, a glaring absence at the center of the web. There is a common argument that superheroes are a modern mythology and that fandom is a secular religion. Perhaps Madame Web is best understood in that context. It’s the product of a deeply trying time for the larger superhero genre. It’s a movie that promises salvation is coming and the future is bright. Spider-Man will be here any moment.

This is the original sin of shared universes as a concept. The beauty of the MCU was that individual well-received movies created an interlocking narrative that built the audience’s faith in the larger brand. However, it increasingly seems like Hollywood misunderstood the way that dynamic worked, believing that faith in the brand comes ahead of everything else. That such trust doesn’t develop in response to quality output, but comes from proximity to the brand, and can buoy subpar product.

Madame Web is built around the idea that whenever Spider-Man isn’t onscreen – and that’s always, because he’s in a different shared universe – the characters should be heavily alluding to Spider-Man. It’s an attempt to reverse-engineer a bankable movie from an asset just out of reach. Repeatedly in Madame Web, Cassandra is told that “when you take on the responsibility, great power will come.” However, as with so much about Madame Web, that feels like it’s got the entire concept backwards.