A year after “Madame Web” flopped at the box office, star Dakota Johnson explained she was “just sort of along for the ride,” because most of the creative decisions for Sony Pictures’ feature film take on the Marvel character were “made by committee.”
Johnson, who’s promoting her new Celine Song movie “Materialists,” told the Los Angeles Times, “It wasn’t my fault. 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.”
The actress added, “Unfortunately, with ‘Madame Web,’ it started out as something and turned into something else. And I was just sort of along for the ride at that point. But that happens. Bigger-budget movies fail all the time.”
However, she said she’s not opposed to signing up for another superhero movie. “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?”
Johnson told TheWrap last year that she didn’t even remember the original plot she signed on for: “There were drastic changes. And I can’t even tell you what they were,” she laughed.
In the movie, which was directed by S.J. Clarkson, Johnson played Cassandra Webb, a young paramedic who developed clairvoyant powers after a brush with death and realized that she, Sydney Sweeney’s Julia Cornwall, Isabela Merced’s Anya Corazon and Celeste O’Connor’s Mattie Franklin, were all being hunted by the same masked man.
“Madame Web” opened to a paltry $25.8 million six-day launch in February 2024, well short of the reported $80 million production budget spent before marketing costs.
