“Madame Web’s” performance at the box office couldn’t have been a bigger disappointment. Not even Sydney Sweeney, one of the film’s lead supporting characters, could persuade a larger audience to view the film—Dakota Johnson joked on SNL that “Madame Web” was “like if AI had made your boyfriend’s favorite movie,” nodding to the film’s notable cast. Unfortunately, movie-goers and critics alike were indifferent.
Earning only $17.6 million for its domestic box office opening weekend, “Madame Web” is officially the worst-performing “Spider-Man” related film in history with its exceptionally meager debut. Scoring only 13% on Rotten Tomatoes, “Madame Web” has received the lowest critic score of any major superhero film in nearly a decade.
These are not the records the film set out to break. Released by Sony Pictures Entertainment, the studio was hopeful of creating a larger, Spidey-centric superhero universe to compete with its studio contemporaries: Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe and Warner Bros. Discovery’s DC Comic Universe. Instead, the IP bank of 900 Spider-Man-related characters that Sony planned to launch an entire franchise with will have to remain on the shelf while the studio reels from this major flop.
The travesty of “Madame Web” hasn’t been the only letdown we’ve witnessed lately for our superhero universes. “The Marvels,” which debuted in 2023, had the lowest opening weekend box office in MCU history, grossing only $47 million.
This seems to be a common theme with other female-led superhero movies. Just look at DC’s “Catwoman” (released in 2004 to an opening weekend of a mere $16.72 million) and Marvel’s “Elektra” (opening weekend box office of $12.8 million in 2005).
This long slew of flops begs the question: why aren’t female-led superhero movies as successful as other superhero films? Is it because girl superheroes really aren’t as cool as boy superheroes?
I’ll give you a hint: No.
“Wonder Woman” dominated its 2017 opening domestic box office weekend with $103.1 million in ticket sales.
“Captain Marvel” crossed the billion-dollar global box office mark, becoming the seventh-highest-grossing film out of the MCU with a $153 million domestic opening weekend in 2019.
“Black Widow” crushed pandemic-era box office records, raking in $80 million in its opening weekend and an additional $60 million in streaming profits from its simultaneous release on the Disney+ platform.
Needless to say, lady superheroes can kick a**.
So then, are the flops of “Madame Web” and “The Marvels” simply unassuming carcasses of the ever-growing, soul-sucking, head-spinning “superhero fatigue” we’ve all griped about at least once—no, a thousand times?
Maybe.
2023′s “Blue Beetle,” starring Xolo Maridueña, also suffered a dismal fate, historically becoming the lowest-grossing DC Extended Universe film of all time, earning only $25 million in its opening weekend.
“Shazam 2″ was also underwhelmed at the box office, scraping together a $30.1 million domestic box office in 2023.
Box office plights aren’t a stranger to male superheroes. Frankly, the issue here is that mass audiences just aren’t interested in shelling out for lesser-known characters.
The folks running the MCU and the DCEU believed that their treasure troves of IP, consisting of hundreds of characters, would supply them with an endless stream of movie ideas and ticket sales. Unfortunately, there is a slim margin of avid comic book fans who know of—let alone care—about the side characters these universes are growing to depend on.
Considering that most female characters in comic universes are written as side characters or as love interests of the more common male superhero, this could inadvertently pose an issue to the longevity of female representation in the superhero space. For one, there are fewer female characters than male characters. Statistically, females make up only 29.3 percent of the DC character list and 24.7 percent of the Marvel roster, according to Walt Hickey of ABCNews’ FiveThirtyEight; however, this imbalance in gender representation makes sense. Being a superhero was (is) the dream of a lot of young boys and men, so it’s only natural that these worlds were created by men for men and that they’d hold most of the representation within these comic universes.
In effect, the MCU and DCEU films’ on-screen representation mirrors the comic book IP they’re based on. Back in the day, the most popular comic book characters were Batman, Superman, and Spider-Man. The one thing in common with them all: the word “man.”
Each of these characters has multiple iterations under its belt; Batman alone appears in 13 live-action films—not counting the animation works that also borrow his name. Superman has had 11 different actors portray the superhero. Spider-Man, with over a dozen films in its universe, has 10 films led by the superhero himself. In contrast, we recall only one Wonder Woman (Gal Gadot), one Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), and were there at one point talks of a Braveheart?
If the most popular comic book characters that continue to proliferate in our media are mainly men, will we recognize them as the main individuals capable of strength and overcoming adversity?
And if the only kind of representation women can expect to receive is rooted in IP that casts them as side characters—who aren’t taken as seriously by audiences regardless of whether the hero is a man or a woman—what hope do female superheroes have of breaking through the noise?
The studios in charge of our superhero universes have a large pressure to fulfill in advocating for representation, but I would expect them to know that already. We all do.
Not a single one of us doesn’t know that “with great power comes great responsibility.”
Unfortunately, we also know the now infamous “Madame Web” line, “he was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.”