So much for a film franchise based around “Madame Web,” the latest Marvel movie produced in cooperation with Sony. It had a horrible opening week, bringing in around just $26 million domestically over its opening six days, and a similar amount globally. Given its much larger budget, that box office haul was bad enough to sink the expected franchise, The Hollywood Reporter reports.
As background, “Madame Web” was expected to mix things up in the superhero movie market in two ways. For one, it was supposed to be funnier and more low-key than most CGI and action-heavy superhero flicks. Further, it stars four women, unlike typically male-heavy superhero movie casts, and so was supposed to appeal more to women than other movies.
Trying to mix things up makes sense, as a slew of flops shows that the superhero movie market might be tapped out, at least for now. But “Madame Web” didn’t do that well, quickly getting bombed across review sites and becoming the butt of joke after joke on Elon’s X, with people panning the quality of the movie and saying it was so bad it was funny.
In fact, it was so bad that it such a franchise. Such is what The Hollywood Reporter claims in an article titled, “Inside Sony’s ‘Madame Web’ Collapse: Forget About a New Franchise.” The article adds, “The flop is wiping out an entire plan for a new movie series, as Sony becomes the latest superhero studio in need of a pivot.”
To show just how bad things went for “Madame Web,” The Hollywood Reporter quotes one film industry insider as saying, “On Wednesday night, you could actually watch advance purchase sales declining in real time as buyers were refunding their tickets.” Giving some additional context on how badly things went, that insider added, “It really says something when you’d rather have Shazam! 2 numbers.”
Continuing, the report went on to note that because of how badly the movie did both domestically and in the global market, the franchise planned around the movie, which Sony apparently hoped to spin into numerous other movies based around the movie’s main character and Peter Parker, is sunk. As The Hollywood Reporter noted, “It set up a future in which the three could have become a team of Spider-Women under the guiding eye of Johnson’s Cassie Webb. Now that’s not going to happen.”
Admitting as much, at least for the short and medium-term, an industry insider told The Hollywood Reporter, “We’re not going to see another Madame Web movie for another decade-plus.” That source added, “It failed. Sony tried to make a movie that was a different type of superhero movie.”
So, it remains to be seen how the movie industry, particularly the blockbuster superhero movie segment of that industry, is able to turn things around and bring back audiences to theaters. One expects it will at least have to figure out how to write plots that appeal to audiences, as one criticism of some of the recent flops is that they were moralizing movies rather than entertaining ones.
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