Dakota Johnson set to star in Spider-Man spin-off Madame Web for Sony
Sony seems to be aware that a movie about Madame Web doesn't make much sense, though
Spider-Man has some cool supporting characters in the comics, but, really, only so many of them seem like they should be able to carry a movie without the ol’ web-head swinging by. Venom did it, Morbius is doing it, and movies about Spider-Woman and Kraven The Hunter are apparently in the works, but when B-tier villains are getting solo stories (it’s true, don’t yell at us in the comments), is there really anywhere else for Sony to go with its somewhat MCU-adjacent line of Spider-Man-related movies?
Evidently yes, because the studio is making—of all things—a Madame Web movie, and it has chosen Dakota Johnson to star in it. We don’t know much about this movie, but Deadline says that S.J. Clarkson (a veteran of the Netflix Marvel shows, among other things) is directing and that “sources have stressed” that this movie might “turn into something else.”
But why? Well, traditionally, Madame Web is an old lady with multiversal precognition powers (she’s a mutant, X-Men-style, but we won’t tell Disney if you won’t) who generally spends all of her time in a char, seeing stuff that might happen in the future and warning Spider-Man and other Spider characters about it. She doesn’t really go on adventures or fight bad guys or anything.
Johnson could be playing one of the other characters to carry the Madame Web name, as Madame Web passing down her name and powers is a thing that happens, but on some level then she’s just playing another Spider-Woman and there’s already a Spider-Woman movie happening. That might not be a big deal, since DC has all of these Batmans running around and nobody seems confused by the difference between Tom Holland’s Spider-Man and Shameik Moore’s Spider-Man, so maybe we should just stop questioning anything that happens with superhero movies and assume that everyone will like everything that comes out.