How Madame Web (potentially) fits into Sony's Spider-Verse

When Madame Web arrives in theaters on February 14 it will be the fourth film in Sony’s connected Spider-Man Universe (or SSU, although no one actually calls it that). Later this year, the roster will grow to six, adding Kraven The Hunter in August and Venom 3 in November. That’s just the official lineup, though. If you follow certain threads, references, cameos, and Easter eggs across all the films, they lead to a much more complicated multiverse. So where does Madame Web fit into the franchise? What will it add to the universe Sony is constructing? And how will it connect to the other films due out this year? We have some answers, along with a healthy amount of speculation and prognostication.

Despite having a much smaller pool of comic-book characters to pull from, Sony seems to be emulating Disney’s Marvel formula in building its own version of the MCU, with varying degrees of success. But unlike Disney, Sony doesn’t have Deadpool to come in and fix it when things go wrong. Or, if the plan is to merge all these different stories into one Unified Marvel Theory, maybe eventually it will. Thanks to the magic of the multiverse it’s possible to draw a direct line from Sam Raimi’s original Spider-Man trilogy starring Tobey Maguire, through the two Amazing Spider-Man films directed by Marc Webb and starring Andrew Garfield, and on into Jon Watts’ rebooted “Home” series starring Tom Holland and then, boom, you’re in the MCU. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Like the three live-action Spider-Verse films before it, Madame Web makes use of characters from different eras of Spider-Man comics, but most likely won’t have an appearance by Peter Parker himself. Here’s what we know for certain: the film stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra “Cassie” Webb, a paramedic who survives an accident and discovers she has clairvoyant abilities. When she has a vision of a man she knows as Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) attacking a group of young women in the future, Cassie steps in to save them. Even though Peter himself won’t appear in the film, that doesn’t mean there won’t be connections to him. Among the characters we’ll meet are Peter’s uncle, Ben Parker (Adam Scott), and his mother, Mary Parker (Emma Roberts).

The state of the Spider-Verse now

A breakout villain from the modern comics era, Venom was brought to the big screen for the first time in the final film of Raimi’s trilogy, Spider-Man 3. Peter is the first to fuse with the alien symbiote, but it eventually finds a more willing and corruptible host in Eddie Brock, aka Venom, played by Topher Grace. The film received mixed reviews, but Sony saw potential in Venom as a standalone character, and eventually set out to resurrect him for in a film of his own.

Tom Hardy was cast as the new Eddie Brock in the 2018’s Venom, the film that kicked off Sony’s current live-action Spider-Verse. Hardy’s version is more of an antihero than a pure villain, and his performance was praised even by critics who panned the film. Despite bad reviews, the film gained cult status among fans, especially those who appreciated Eddie and Venom’s bickering-couple chemistry. They even gave the ’ship a name: “SymBrock.”

It was enough to justify a 2021 sequel titled Let There Be Carnage, which leaned into the goofiness even more. Woody Harrelson, who appeared in the mid-credits scene of Venom, reprises his role as Cletus Kasady, a serial killer who becomes the host of an even worse symbiote called Carnage.

In the film’s post-credit scene, there’s a direct tie-in to the MCU’s Peter Parker. Eddie is in Mexico bickering with Venom, who tells him, “Eighty billion lightyears of hive knowledge across universes would explode your tiny little brain.” Soon there’s a flash of light and they’re in a different hotel room, watching J. Jonah Jamison tell the world that Peter Parker—Tom Holland’s Peter Parker—is Spider-Man. That’s the event that leads directly into Spider-Man: No Way Home. At the end of that film, we come back to Eddie just before he gets sent back to his original universe. But he leaves behind a bit of Venom goo in that universe, setting up a new story arc with that version of Peter.

The lesson Sony seems to have taken from the success of Venom 2 is to lighten up, don’t take these films too seriously, and let creators have free reign to be as weird and wild as they want. That approach may have backfired on 2022’s Morbius, the third film in the series and the one that immediately precedes Madame Web (by release date if not in-universe chronology). It also has a reference in a mid-credits scene to Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, bringing back Michael Keaton as Adrian Toomes, also known as Vulture, who suggests to Morbius that they team up.

“A beautiful web of life and destiny.”

In the comics, Cassie Webb is an elderly woman with a degenerative illness who uses a mechanical chair with spider-like arms. She can see into something called the Web of Destiny, which is where her powers of clairvoyance come from. The Cassie we meet in Madame Web is very different in appearance, but her abilities are similar. Ezekiel also has the ability to see the future. It’s a similar idea to what Peter calls his “Spider Sense” (or “Peter Tingle”), which allows him to avoid danger by sensing it in advance.

Madame Web also appeared In the animated Spider-Man TV series, voiced by Joan Lee. Her powers included not just precognition, but being able to see across the multiverse. In the third season of the show she continually tests Spider-Man to find out if he’s capable of stopping a version of Carnage from destroying everything. If the version of Cassie we’ll be meeting in Madame Web also has this power, she could become an important figure in uniting the multiverse in the future.

The concept of destiny and fate seem to be the central themes that tie all of these different films and projects together. In last year’s animated sequel, Spider-Man: Across The Spider-Verse, Miguel O’Hara shows Miles Morales an image of the Spider-Verse, telling him, “This is everything. All of us, woven together in a beautiful web of life and destiny.”

If Madame Web does have the ability to see all that at once, she may become a very important character in the future of the franchise.