Previously, Johnson revealed that there were such major script changes on Madame Web that the end result was not at all the project she signed on for. To the L.A. Times, she reiterates her criticism about art 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,” she says, adding that she felt she “was just sort of along for the ride” when the movie started evolving away from the original concept. “But that happens. Bigger-budget movies fail all the time,” she observes.
In March 2024, she opined that she doesn’t “make sense in that world”—presumably the superhero blockbuster, or maybe the big-budget sci-fi action flick in general. Nevertheless she tried it out, unlike the many rom-com offers she got between 2016’s How To Be Single and 2025’s Materialists. The scripts she received were “not good,” she says. “I think a lot of what I read these days is void of soul and heart,” she continues. “And [Materialists writer-director Celine Song] is all soul and heart. I really love a rom-com if it feels like I can connect to the people in it. And I think I’ve found it hard to connect to the people in some of the ones that I’ve been offered.”
Having turned down a lot of rom-coms but said yes to Madame Web, we can only conclude that she felt connected to Cassandra Webb. (Or connected to the hefty paycheck attached to such an endeavor.) Nevertheless, though she told Bustle last year that she’d probably never do anything like Madame Web again, she’s now changed her tune: “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,” she tells the L.A. Times. “I’ve done even tiny movies that didn’t do well. Who cares?”
