Board 8 > Madame Web reviews: "It is the Cats: The Movie of superhero movies"

(+) Yeah! (+)

I feel like Indy 5 came and went without much fanfare

Indiana Jones 5 wasn't great, but it made at least some profit. Although, Wikipedia says Madame Web made 11 million dollars in profit, so what do I know.

The usual estimate is that films need to gross twice their budget to break even

Nonetheless, a lot of effort and $80 million went into creating the most flamboyant product placement ever designed for a soft drink.

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It did feel like Dial of Destiny didn't have anywhere near the marketing of Crystal Skull, but that is completely anecdotal and quite possibly very wrong.

I think it's more that people were less hyped for DoD because Crystal Skull wasn't very liked.

This is abysmal on every conceivable level. It's badly cast and the screenplay is atrocious in that this feels like a terrible first draft that somebody rushed out in the first week.

If I had to do a tier list of product placement in movies, I dont know if anything would beat the Dunkaccino musical number in Jack and Jill and the Waynes World anti-product placement product placement

but I think Ezekiel getting crushed by product placement is pretty great and would place high

Germane to really nothing, but here's an interesting popularity list from 2007 on one of the comic websites with the most traffic at the time: https://www.cbr.com/top-100-dc-and-marvel-characters-master-list/

Man, that was what, right before Arkham Asylum? Right before Harley started skyrocketing? She's not on the list - I'd be curious to see where she fell today. Ivy also misses.

https://twitter.com/Todd_Spence/status/1765070631635505438

Good take except for saying that audiences are "extremely smart." That's just hilarious. People are stupid as fuck, that's why these corporations try, and do, get away with so much bullshit.

People are stupid as fuck, that's why these corporations try, and do, get away with so much bullshit.

Cinematic disasters shouldnt be this boring. Directed by S.J. Clarkson, Madame Web is a collection of misfires and missteps, awkward dialogue, weightless action, shoehorned-in referencesall told without any sense of urgency at all.

That reminds me of when one of the anti-anti-progressive YouTubers I follow posted a clip of their response to a MauLer podcast called "The Assassination of Chris Stuckmann by the Coward Chris Stuckmann" (which was a reaction to Stuckmann's video on Madame Web which he did not consider to be a proper review but more a commentary on how the movie allegedly represents the worst of the studio system) where I saw The Critical Drinker say "Sony probably wants a good Madame Web movie". While this may be true in the broadest sense possible, how naive would you have to be to realize after all the horror stories that have come out about the entertainment industry that executives typically care more about selling crap than about making quality art? Especially considering this particular studio's track record with Spider-Man...oh wait, I guess Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 are too far in the past for people to remember.

Since both movies in question are reasonably relevant to Madame Web, I'll say I broadly had similar problems with both Venom and Captain Marvel regarding how those movies seemed to substitute potential substance either movie could have had for what moviegoing audiences would find bankable regarding the Venom character and the MCU respectively. That's also why I thought the idea Disney had to inflate the latter movie's box office was laughable right from the get go, and even discounting its sequel genuinely bombing hard (apparently it's doing well on streaming though?) I've realized even more holes in that theory as time passes (e.g. the fact Dark Phoenix bombed so hard that Disney reported a financial underperformance for that fiscal quarter in spite of Endgame, so evidently they weren't concerned about covering losses there. Not to mention Disney was in the process of finalizing a $60 billion+ acquisition of another entire movie studio when Captain Marvel came out - inflating one movie's box office wouldn't be so much uncharacteristically evil for Disney so much as it would be uncharacteristically petty).

Speaking of which, The Marvels bombing because Disney couldn't promote it properly (due to the actor's strike) is another example of how stupid moviegoing audiences are since I can fully believe the kinds of people who would normally watch Marvel movies weren't even aware it had come out and only see them because of their event status. And on a similar note, movies like Gods of Egypt (incidentally same writers as Madame Web) and the live-action Ghost in the Shell getting overshadowed by whitewashing controversies limiting the amount of coverage the press was willing to give movies like those also makes it clear how important it is to get the word out. I also probably brought up earlier how I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if there was market research showing that female moviegoers had a higher preference for seeing female leads than male moviegoers for their gender. Doesn't help I know at least one instance where a creative was allegedly told to confrontationally accuse people of sexism for not seeing their movie (Elizabeth Banks regarding her failed Charlie's Angels revival), so I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if the same was true for cases like Paul Feig and Ghostbusters, Tim Miller and Terminator: Dark Fate (doesn't help he disowned it afterwards), James Mangold and the new Indiana Jones movie, etc.

On a more positive note, the highest-grossing comic book movie last year domestically had a woman and a black guy in the lead. And the highest-grossing comic book movie the year before domestically had a black woman in the lead. Go woke, go broke!

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Madame Web lumbers from setpiece to setpiece, with a perpetually irritated Johnson acting as she'd rather be anywhere but here.

And I'm reading that Sony is looking at about a $250 million loss as things stand.