Trivia / Madame Web (2024)

• Acting in the Dark: In a sense. Dakota Johnson mentioned that acting against a blue screen and fake explosions that weren't really there meant that she really doesn't know how she did relative to what the filmmakers will do. It was her first movie with extensive blue screen usage.
• Actor-Shared Background: Julia mentions knowing taekwondo. Sydney Sweeney is a very avid practitioner of mixed martials arts in real life.
• Box Office Bomb: Budget: $80 million, plus $60 million spent on marketing. Worldwide box office: $100.3 million. This movie suffered from a complete lack of marketing^note Reportedly, 75% of its marketing budget went towards social media ads, a reception so negative that people were refunding their pre-ordered tickets, being released in February and numerous rewrites that ballooned the budget. It ended up having the worst opening weekend for a SSU film (opening even lower than Morbius), being released on digital platforms only one month after release, and leaving theaters not long after.
• Celebrity Voice Actor: The titular character is voiced in the Japanese dub by actress and former AKB48 idol Yuko Oshima.^note Through this is not her first time doing voice acting, as she was the dub voice of Merida in Brave.
• Creator Backlash:
  • Dakota Johnson, who's famous for being blunt and snarky in interviews, got attention during her press tour in the leadup to the film's release for having a noticeable lack of enthusiasm for it. Specifically, she mentioned that acting against a blue screen left her with an uneasy feeling about the movie's quality but that she ultimately trusted S. J. Clarkson as a director; otherwise, she didn't directly blast the film too much, instead focusing her criticism on Hollywood in general and its aversion to risk-taking. After the movie came out, she was a lot more candid, stating that she was "not surprised" that the film got "ripped to shreds" and that she "will probably never do anything like it again", feeling the film was full of "decisions made by committee":
    Dakota Johnson: Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they're not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren't going to fucking want to see those.
  • Sydney Sweeney seemed to want to distance herself from the film after its release, stating in an interview with the Los Angeles Times that "I was just hired as an actress in it, so I was just along for the ride for whatever was going to happen." She also took some minor jabs at the film's failure in her monologue when she hosted Saturday Night Live.
    Sydney Sweeney: You might have seen me in Anyone but You and Euphoria. You definitely did not see me in Madame Web.
• Dawson Casting: All three teenage characters are played by actors^*(Celeste O'Connor is non-binary) at various points in their 20s during filming, with Sydney Sweeney and Celeste O'Connor being the most extreme cases, being probably at least a decade older than their characters are supposed to be.
• Executive Meddling: According to Dakota Johnson in an interview with The Wrap, the screenplay underwent extensive rewrites, though she couldn’t go into detail about what the changes were. The original screenplay, which was described as darker and "very 'Terminator' inspired," would have seen Madame Web and the Spider-Women trying to protect a pregnant Mary Parker from a time-traveling Ezekiel Sims, who wants to kill her to prevent the birth of Peter Parker. Johnson further said that the film she shot was "unrecognizable" from the version of the script she signed on to make.
• Flip-Flop of God: Initially, the official synopsis for the film on the Sony Pictures website had the sentence "Meanwhile, in another universe", suggesting that, while part of Sony's Spider-Man multiverse, the film takes place in its own universe, separate from events in the SSU or the Spider-Verse. However, this was removed sometime after release.
• Invisible Advertising: The movie had just one major trailer released three months before its release (all prior Sony's Spider-Man Universe movies had at least three trailers and more than seven months between the first teaser and theatrical release), and only about two weeks before the movie hit theatres did Sony start releasing smaller ads.
• Missing Trailer Scene: The trailer's most widely mocked line, "He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died", is not in the actual film.
• One for the Money; One for the Art: Sort of. Sydney Sweeney has explained that making Madame Web was a "strategic business decision" to create a working relationship with Sony, and so she can get cast in specific films they were making.
• Schedule Slip: The film was originally supposed to be released on July 7, 2023, but was pushed back to February 16, 2024 before it was moved up to Valentine's Day of that year.
• So My Kids Can Watch: A variation, as Sydney Sweeney, famed for playing Ms. Fanservice characters in family-unfriendly projects like Euphoria, says she "was happy to bring to life a character that my little cousins are excited about."
• Stock Footage: One of Cassandra's visions reuses footage from Spider-Man 2.
• What Could Have Been: See here.

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