Madame Web star Dakota Johnson has joked about her widely-panned superhero movie’s status as a box office bomb.
Appearing as the host of this week’s Saturday Night Live, Johnson humorously noted that she had last fronted the show back in 2024 while promoting the Spider-Man spinoff. And now, she continued, she was still trying to promote Madame Web — as the movie was still trying to turn a profit.
“The last time I was here I was promoting a movie called Madame Web, thank you,” Johnson said to muted applause. “And tonight I’m still promoting it because the movie still hasn’t made any money yet.”
Madame Web is infamously bad, even in a run of films from Sony that also includes Morbius and Venom 3. It made $100.5 million at the box office from a gross budget of $100 million (although factoring in distributor costs is believed to still made a loss). It was also a disaster critically: the subject of widespread memes online and a 10% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. It later scooped three Golden Raspberry awards, including Worst Actress for Johnson herself.
While the film did not make a lot of cash, Madame Web is a long way from ranking among Hollywood’s worst box office bombs — or even the worst-performing comic book movie. Disney’s John Carter is widely-regarded as the biggest commercial failure of all time, losing up to $200 million. Disney’s The Lone Ranger lost up to $190 million, meanwhile. Just behind those was The Marvels, which lost a similar amount and remains the worst-performing comic book movie ever — a fate Madame Web avoided by being far cheaper to make.
“Madame Web has the makings of an interesting hybrid,” we wrote in IGN’s Madame Web review, which returned a 5/10 score. “But with a script overcrowded with extraneous characters, basic archetypes, and generic dialogue, it fails the talent and the future of its onscreen Spider-Women.”
Earlier this year, Sony Pictures boss Tom Rothman acknowledged that “the audience wasn’t satisfied enough” with its live-action Spider-Man spinoff movies. Starting with Hardy’s Venom in 2018, the full roster included that film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius, Madame Web, Venom: The Last Dance, and Kraven the Hunter. Sony had, at one point, planned to integrate Spider-Man into the villain-led offshoots, though such a crossover never came to fruition.
Image credit: TheStewartofNY/Getty Images
Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at [email protected] or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social
