How Sony is selling the latest kinda sorta Spider-Man spinoff
Madame Web, out this week from Sony Pictures, stars Dakota Johnson as Cassandra Cain, a Manhattan paramedic partnered with Ben Parker (Adam Scott). Cassandra develops psychic abilities allowing her to glimpse the future after being involved in an accident. One day she encounters three young women – Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anna Corazon (Isabela Merced) and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) – all of whom have been targeted by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), an explorer who gained powers of his own from a spider in the Amazon. Sims believes all three of those women present a future threat to him when they become different incarnations of Spider-Woman. So Cassandra uses her abilities to keep them safe while also dealing with the fact that Sims was one of the last people to see Cain’s mother alive years earlier.
The movie is based on the Marvel Comics character Madame Webb, though this incarnation jettisons some of that character’s mythology while adding some new elements and pulling bits from the various comics’ versions over the years. Along with that it establishes a loose connection to the most recent cinematic Spider-Man played by Tom Holland, setting the story in the early 2000s.
Directed by S. J. Clarkson from a screenplay by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless (who earlier wrote Morbius), the film also stars Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, Kerry Bishé, Zosia Mamet and others. So with all that in mind, let’s look at how Sony Pictures has sold it to the public.
announcement and casting
Sony hired Clarkson to develop an as-yet-unnamed Spider-Man spinoff in mid-2020, with the project confirmed as a Madame Web film in late 2021.
After completing the search for a lead actor, Sony made the movie official in February 2022 with Johnson in the title role. Sweeney joined the cast a month or so later with others, including Rahim and Roberts, coming aboard just before filming began in June of that year.
Sony originally planned for the movie to come out in July 2023 but then pushed that to October before eventually setting the current release date in
the marketing campaign
A featurette was the first shot in the marketing campaign back in November of 2023. In it Johnson talks about how much she loves the character while Clarkson explains more of who Cassie Cain is and what motivates her, along with how she’s connected to some of the others in the story.
A month later the first trailer (3.5mm YouTube plays) came out. It opens by showing Cassie confronting Sims – himself docked out in a very spider-centric costume – in order to protect his three targets. Then it jumps back to show her working as a paramedic, which leads to the accident where she gains her psychic powers, before jumping forward again as we see Cassie explaining what’s going on to her three charges, including her connection to Sims. There’s a bit more action and some slowed down pop music to set the tone, but no real clarity on what Sims’ motivations might be.
“Her web connects them all” the poster released at the same time declares as it shows Cain at the center of a web with Cornwall, Franklin and Corazon along the sides along with Sims. Because they’re all connected, you see. Yeah, you see. Each character’s costumed persona is seen in a small slice of the web alongside them.
An AR lens for various mobile apps came out shortly after that.
We get a bit more of Sims threatening Cain in a TV spot released in mid-January, though it largely features footage already seen in the trailer.
A series of mostly black-and-white character posters came out after that. Interestingly, the four women have their faces uncovered, with just the very top of their eventual super hero costumes seen. But Sims has his entire face hidden behind the mask he wears. Must be tough to be Tahar Rahim.
Those posters were accompanied by another featurette that has most of the main cast offering insights into how their characters are connected through Cassie and what that means for the story. Additional featurettes focused on how the story – which is about psychic spider-people – is so grounded in reality, who Ezekiel Sims is and what he’s after in the movie and what each character’s powers are.
Johnson appeared on “The Tonight Show” in January and “Late Night” in early February, shortly after she hosted “Saturday Night Live.”
Sony sponsored a Spotify feature where Madam Web “unwraps your future playlist”, meaning it shows a handful of songs you’re likely to listen to in the near future.
Exhibitor/format-exclusive one-sheets were created for IMAX, 4DX and ScreenX.
The cast and crew were in attendance at the film’s premiere last weekend, talking about why they got involved in the movie, how the script changed dramatically before filming and more. Clarkson also confirmed there was no post-credits sequence.
overall
It’s hard to get an accurate read on this campaign. Sony needs to keep their extensions of the Spider-Man universe going, all while not directly connecting to Spider-Man himself because of how it currently shares the character with Disney, so it keeps highlighting all sorts of spider-like characters and asking the audience to do the heavy lifting.
The brief glimpses of the various Spider-Woman characters in costume is likely a bit of misdirection, probably pulled from one or two sequences of Sims or Cain glimpsing the future, but here those looks are used by the studio to make sure a good portion of the audience thinks this is a full-fledged super hero movie, not an action drama about a psychic trying to protect three young women with no powers.
Johnson gives her best effort to make it seem she’s really excited about the project but it’s hard to believe most of that, the exception being when she was asked about clunky line of exposition in the trailer going viral and admitted she didn’t know it had happened while also being indignant that one line of dialogue was pulled out for scrutiny free of context. And it turns out that line isn’t even in the finished film.
All of which helps to explain the anemic $20-25mm opening weekend the movie is projected to have.
Cinematic Slant 