The world must know how Sydney Sweeney feels about Madame Web

In between starring in a romantic comedy that actually made money and sending the internet into a tailspin for having breasts, Sydney Sweeney has had some explaining to do. Like, does she know that she was in Madame Web, the first bad superhero movie? Of course, she does. In fact, she’s already answered for it, telling The Los Angeles Times some weeks back that she was “just hired as an actor” and “happy to bring to life a character that my little cousins are excited about.” That’s nice, but it’s not enough. The culture’s hunger to get Sweeney to say something negative about her co-workers must be satiated.

Speaking with GQ, Sweeney had a new excuse for being in a bad movie: Her career. As it turns out, actors must act in order to make money, and sometimes, when an industry is so focused on a particular type of product, even a movie about a psychic spider-woman, which sounds like a winner on paper, stumbles out the gate. Ever the pro, Sweeney sees some projects, like Madame Web, as “strategic business decisions,” saying Web was a “building block” that helped her forge her relationship with Sony. Thanks to Madame Web, she was able to sell Anyone But You and get Barbarella.

Sweeney has long been upfront about her business acumen. In 2022, she responded to criticism over her penchant for posting sponcon on Instagram, forcing her to admit that she, sadly, is not one of those “nepo babies” running amok around Hollywood and the dictionary. She has bills to pay. “If I just acted, I wouldn’t be able to afford my life in L.A,“ Sweeney said in 2022. “I take deals because I have to.” The actor is very wealthy by most standards and likely doing better than when she told The Hollywood Reporter she doesn’t have the income to take a six-month break. But she still has to work for a living. Sometimes, that means being in a stupid movie.

Are Sweeney or Dakota Johnson actually responsible for signing on to a movie with as stupid a premise as Madame Web? That’s hard to say. Haven’t we, as a culture, told Hollywood for more than a decade that we want Spider-Man movies and lots of them? That we are so hungry for them that we’ll admit to having some nostalgia for The Amazing Spider-Man? Didn’t a movie featuring many of the concepts and characters from Madame Web just get nominated for an Oscar? No star is immune from failure, especially if they’re wading into the deteriorating world of superhero movies. There isn’t much more to it than superhero movies were hot and studios were willing to cut big deals to get popular actors in them. But hey, talking about Madame Web still beats investigating the actual debate over whether Sweeney’s boobs are killing wokeness.