Given Sony's track record, most fans didn't have particularly high expectations for Madame Web. So, when the movie debuted with 12% on Rotten Tomatoes and - by the end of its run - earned only $100.3 million at the worldwide box office, it didn't come as a huge surprise.
Despite boasting an impressive cast and a director with superhero experience in SJ Clarkson (Jessica Jones, The Defenders), little to nothing about Madame Web worked and it's now destined to be remembered as one of the worst superhero movies ever made.
Producer Avi Arad wasn't involved with Madame Web (a genuine surprise given his dismal history with Marvel) but Lorenzo di Bonaventura was. While his credits include the G.I. Joe and Transformers franchises, his presence clearly did little to help elevate a movie penned by the Morbius scribes.
Talking to ComicBook.com at the San Diego Comic-Con, Bonaventura was asked whether there's a chance we'll see the Spider-Women again.
"I don't have any idea. I, I really don't know," he admitted. "Yeah, that, that was uh, that was a heartbreaking experience in the theater. So I'll tell you that." Asked what it's like to release a movie in theaters that fails to connect with fans, Bonaventura compared it to, "Like an Axe in your head."
"I think one of the things, and, and this is a longer conversation which I'd be happy to have. I think one of the problems with streaming is that we don't know how to judge failure or success, right? Opening weekend when it doesn't work, you just got slammed side of your head," he continued. "And so the brutalness of failure really makes you concentrate on the next movie."
"And I don't want that experience again. So there's a, it's a harsher experience. So I think that has a lot to do with what kind of movies now that I look at, like, all right, how am I gonna approach this?"
There's no doubt a story to be told when it comes to what happened with Madame Web. Dakota Johnson, Sydney Sweeney, and Emma Roberts have all addressed the movie's failings; Clarkson, however, has not.
Was Madame Web once meant to set the stage to bring Peter Parker into Sony's Marvel Universe? We see him being born and the early 2000s setting means he'd be an adult in the present day; so, before the movie started being billed as a "standalone" story, it seems the idea might have been to bring Spider-Man into "Sony's Universe of Marvel Characters." Thankfully, it didn't happen.
Would you like a Madame Web sequel?