Dakota Johnson Opens Up About the MADAME WEB Mess - 'It Wasn't My Fault' — GeekTyrant
Madame Web has firmly cemented itself as a disaster of a comic book movie. With a 12% Rotten Tomatoes score, a worldwide gross just over $100 million, and more memes than fans, it didn't exactly stick the landing.
Dakota Johnson, the face of the film's chaos, recently did an interview with The Los Angeles Times, and when asked about the flop. Her response? A sharp laugh and:
'It wasn't my fault.'
She went on to elaborate:
'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.'
That 'something else' ended up being a confusing mess of half-baked plot threads, bad dialogue, and Spider-Women with almost no Spider-ing. Johnson, who played Cassandra Webb, became the unwilling symbol of a movie that never really had a chance.
Despite a cast that included Sydney Sweeney and Isabela Merced, the film felt like a product assembled in a boardroom with bullet points instead of a story. She added:
'I was just sort of along for the ride at that point. But that happens. Bigger-budget movies fail all the time. I don't have a Band-Aid over it.
'There's no part of me that's like, 'Oh, I'll never do that again' to anything. I've done even tiny movies that didn't do well. Who cares?'
Madame Web was once rumored to have ties to the larger Marvel Cinematic Universe, possibly featuring a young Peter Parker under the protection of Cassandra and the Spider-Women. Instead, audiences got a vague prequel with a pregnant Mary Parker whose storyline went nowhere and a plot that felt like it had been shredded in a multiversal blender.
So, what really happened? Studio interference. Creative-by-committee. A genre machine trying to reverse-engineer another hit without understanding why the good ones work.
Dakota Johnson may not have escaped the wreckage unscathed, but at least she's honest about the ride and ready to move on.
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