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Dakota Johnson has laid the blame for Madame Web’s dismal showing at the box office squarely at the feet of people at studios who “don’t have a creative bone in their body”.
Johnson played Cassandra Webb, a New York paramedic who crosses paths with three young women, played by Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, and Celeste O'Connor, whom she must protect from a mysterious adversary who wants them destroyed.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Johnson told the Los Angeles Times about the film flopping. “There’s this thing that happens now where a lot of creative decisions are 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.”
“And I think unfortunately with Madame Web, it started out as something and turned into something else. And I was just sort of along for the ride at that point. But that happens. Bigger-budget movies fail all the time.”
The Daddio actor has spoken previously about “drastic changes” made to the script after she had signed on, as well as her unhappiness at creative choices being made by executives at Hollywood.
“Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms,” she said in March last year. “My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bulls***. Even if films start to be made with [artificial intelligence], humans aren’t going to f***ing want to see those.”
The Independent has reached out to Sony Pictures for comment.
However, Johnson may have relented on never starring in superhero films. She said last year that she “probably will never do anything like it again because I don’t make sense in that world”.
She has told the LA Times now that she doesn’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. I’ve done even tiny movies that didn’t do well. Who cares?”
The Independent’s Clarrise Loughrey labeled Madame Web “a desperate comic book misfire that seems embarrassed by its own existence,” in her one-star review.
Johnson will be seen next in Celine Song’s Materialists, where she stars opposite Pedro Pascal and Chris Evans, as a New York City matchmaker who finds herself “torn between the perfect match and her imperfect ex”.
The A24 film, set to be released internationally on 15 August, has garnered much buzz online, where fans have celebrated it for being a return to the style of the classic 90s’ romantic comedy.
English (US) ·