“You’re holding it wrong.” — Steve Jobs
iPhone 4 was arguably the biggest iPhone release ever, as it introduced a massive hardware upgrade compared to its predecessors and brought forth the flat and minimal design language that the company still uses today. However, it suffered from signal attenuation (poor reception) when held in a certain way, and Apple responded to the issue by blaming its customers. The quote is often attributed to Steve Jobs, but he never said those words — his exact words were, “Just avoid holding it in that way.” Still, that doesn’t change the fact that Apple easily downplayed an obvious issue and shifted the blame.
Apple basically wrote How to Blame Your Customers and Get Away with It. To clarify, that’s not an actual book, but the joke perfectly describes the way in which the company addresses customer complaints. Fast-forward 14 years, and Sony seems to have taken a page out of Apple’s fictional book, applying the same blame-the-user strategy to 2024’s Madame Web movie. For context, the movie failed miserably across all metrics and, just like always, when something flops, the blame game begins. But we’re here to discover who’s truly at fault.
Madame Web belongs to Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU), which is Sony’s attempt to create an MCU-like universe and build upon the success of previously released Spider-Man movies — the ones connected to the MCU. Sadly, the company’s attempts failed with every release, and Madame Web debuted to poor reviews from the critics, lackluster audience scores, and an underwhelming box office performance. It actually did worse than Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, which is by far the worst-performing movie in the MCU, with a 22.6% return on investment. Far worse, with only a 0.5% return on its budget.
As previously stated, following the poor performance of Madame Web, the blame game began. Instead of reflecting on what went wrong — be it the script, direction, or marketing — Sony decided that the real problem wasn’t Madame Web itself, but rather the people who watched the movie. Or, more accurately, the ones who didn’t. So, are viewers and critics really to blame, or does the burden of guilt lie on Sony and those associated with the movie?
Let’s start with the story. Madame Web follows EMT Casey Webb, who develops clairvoyance and sets out to protect three teenage girls from Ezekiel Sims—a man with spider-like abilities similar to Peter Parker. Sims is determined to kill them because of a recurring vision in which they gain superpowers and ultimately murder him. The problem? The movie never explains why they would want him dead. Yes, he’s the villain, a wealthy man who exploited powers he didn’t rightfully earn, but the film never justifies why the girls would turn against him in the future.
Sims operates under the classic “preemptive strike” logic seen in other villains, but Madame Web never establishes any real reason for the girls to turn against him. There’s no backstory explaining their supposed future conflict, making his paranoia feel baseless. Worse, his actions create a paradox — had he not hunted them down, would they have ever become a threat at all? Instead of a compelling antagonist with clear motivations, Sims feels like a narrative shortcut, a villain whose existence serves the plot rather than shaping it. This lack of depth is just one of the many reasons behind Madame Web’s critical and financial failure.
The truth is that Madame Web fought an uphill battle before its opening weekend. The lack of narrative coherence and overall poor storytelling resulted in scathing early reviews, which directly impacted ticket sales. Many people simply canceled their pre-orders before giving Madame Web a shot. By the time the movie finally hit the theaters, the damage was done, and it was only exacerbated by the word-of-mouth of those who actually saw the movie. This buried Madame Web even deeper, accelerating its box office collapse.
However, there’s a market for everything, and the movie did gain some positive attention on Netflix. Three months after its opening weekend, Madame Web debuted at #2 on Netflix’s Global Top 10 Movies list and as #1 on the streamer’s Top 10 US Movies chart. The film is still available to stream on Netflix. Sony jumped on that miniature success train to defend the movie and accentuate that the burden of guilt for Madame Web’s flopping lies with the critics and theatergoers.
But the argument conveniently ignores the reality that successful movies thrive in theaters first or go on to become cult classics 20 years down the road; just look at Fight Club. Sony later argued that Venom: The Last Dance received a similar treatment, but the only reason the bad press and criticism didn’t work was because the audiences love Venom. And there might be some truth to that. The last Venom really did poorly with the critics, but its audience score is currently at 80%, attesting to the fact that moviegoers really loved the film.
Sadly, that doesn’t apply to Madame Web, as its audience score still sits at 55% (based on 1,000+ verified ratings), even after it found success on Netflix. So, instead of admitting to missteps in marketing (which were epic), storytelling, or direction, Sony decided to point fingers outwards. It wasn’t the awkward dialogue, the uninspired action, a villain with a motivation that’s thinner than the webbing in the movie, or the horrible direction that caused Madame Web to flop. No, the audiences and the critics just watched the movie wrong — at least according to Sony.