The opening day box office numbers for Madame Web are in – and to the surprise of absolutely no one, very, very few audiences were interested in Sony’s latest misguided attempt to build out their ‘Spider-Man-without-Spider-Man’ film universe.
Per box office analytic outlet The-Numbers, the Dakota Johnson-led bait-and-switch managed to pull in only $6,051,012 – roughly $1,508 from each of the 4,013 domestic theaters which screened it on opening night – in its Valentine’s Day debut.
But to truly sell just how big of a disaster this result is, one would do best to compare Madame Web’s performance against those of its direct competitors.
Staying on the studio lot, Sony’s previous Spider-Man spin-off, Morbius, managed to pull in $11,605,908 – a pull of approximately $4,055 per each of the 4,268 theaters it premiered in – before theaters closed on its opening night.
Over at Marvel Studios proper, the franchise’s biggest box office bomb, The Marvels, despite the then-already low interest among audiences in the continued adventures of the MCU, ended its debut night with $15,003,104 from across 4,030 theaters.
And while the abysmal quality of Morbius undoubtedly led some audiences to skip a trip to the theater, that the film ultimately ended its premiere night with less than half the success of its most widely-panned peers suggests that no one outside of internet critics and die hard Marvel consumers have any interest in Madame Web.
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Lending further credence to this ‘disinterest theory’ is the fact the film has suffered an absolutely astonishing second-day drop-off.
By end of day on February 15th, Madame Web had only managed to pull in just $537 per theater for a grand total of only $2,153,607.
And if that wasn’t enough financial trouble for the clairvoyant spider-ally, with the film having reportedly cost $80 Million to produce – and thus, according to the standard total budget calculation of ‘double the public numbers’, $160 Million in total – this lack of audience enthusiasm suggests it will ultimately be unable to come anywhere close to breaking even, let alone making anything resembling actual profit.
As noted above, while these box office results are objectively disastrous, they do not, in the least, come as a surprise.
After all, between focusing the film on an obscure, E-lister-at-best comic book character, leaving it completely disconnected from Sony or Marvel Studios’ respective cinematic franchises, and – this cannot be stressed enough – its lack of Spider-Man himself, what was there for audiences to truly latch onto and get excited for?
Combine that with critic reviews that essentially boil down to ‘Why does this even exist?’ and even a blind woman could see that Madame Web was almost certainly doomed from the get-go.
For the morbidly curious – seriously, this film is basically ‘What if you had a fever dream and it was all edited by Transformers-era Michael Bay?’ – Madame Web is now playing in theaters.