[COLUMN] Hollywood is Already Learning the Wrong Lessons from Madame Web | by Darren Mooney

Last weekend, Madame Web crashed and burned at the box office. Perhaps the most interesting consequence of this was a report in The Hollywood Reporter that confirmed the term “superhero fatigue” had “evolved from a term used by some corners of the fandom to something reluctantly accepted as industry fact.” Studio executives had accepted the new reality. The only question was how they were going to react to it.

The assumption would be that the studios would slow down production and release, responding to a diminished demand by throttling the supply, reducing expenditure while also increasing box office revenue. At Disney, Bob Iger has already signaled an intent to ease the company’s superhero-themed content. However, Sony didn’t act predictably. It was announced Sony and Amazon were planning another Spider-Man-adjacent project, a live-action Spider-Man: Noir series starring Nicolas Cage.

However, this announcement seemed to represent a pivot for Sony and Amazon’s partnership. Over the weekend, The Ankler reported that Amazon studios had already begun retooling its planned women-led Sony-adjacent series, Silk: Spider Society, reworking it “with a more male-skewing audience in mind.” These twinned new items, which emerged in the wake of the failure of Madame Web, are a fascinating illustration of the double-standard that still exists within the superhero genre. The problem, it seems, were women.

While women were very prominent in the early days of Hollywood, they have long faced systemic disadvantages. Last year, women accounted for only “22% of all directors, writers, producers, executive producers, editors, and cinematographers working on the 250 top grossing films” of the year, which was actually down 2% from the previous year. Last year, women-led films dropped to just 30% of the market, the lowest percentage in a decade.

This is particularly true in the superhero genre. As a rule, the major studios were slow to invest in female or minority superheroes. While Batman received his first theatrical movie in 1966 and Superman hit the silver screen in 1978, Wonder Woman would not get a feature film until 2017. For the first ten years of the superhero boom, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (the MCU) was dominated by three white guys named Chris. Even superheroes couldn’t fly through the glass ceiling.

Of course, there are any number of excuses that might be offered and scapegoats that might be blamed. Ike Perlmutter is frequently cited as a roadblock. However, the truth is simply that these large companies didn’t want to make these movies. These gigantic corporations only began to foreground women and people of color once the genre had reached peak production and the market was already saturated.

Incidentally, this is what had happened towards the end of the 1990s, in the wake of the smaller superhero cinema boom spurred by Tim Burton’s Batman. Towards the end of the decade, movies like Spawn and Blade were built around superheroes of color. These proved just as popular as the films starring white male heroes. Spawn, starring Michael Jai White, returned $87 million on a $40 million budget. Starring Wesley Snipes, Blade arguably kickstarted the modern superhero boom.

Reflecting pent-up desire for superhero films reflecting diverse perspectives, these female- and person-of-color-led superhero movies overperformed. Captain Marvel grossed over a billion dollars. Black Panther outgrossed Avengers: Infinity War at the domestic box office, became a cultural phenomenon, and earned Marvel Studios their first Best Picture nomination. They outgrossed contemporary Chris-led entries like Thor: Ragnarok and Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2.

In hindsight, this was the end of the superhero boom, the last few bites of the apple. The market disruption caused by the pandemic served to camouflage the trend, it was clear that audiences were no longer as excited by superheroes as they had once been. Avengers: Endgame would be the last Marvel Studios production to gross over a billion dollars. Finally, having wrung as much profit as possible from the genre, the studio was willing to foreground women and creators of color.

Of course, these female and minority actors and directors operated on a last-on, first-off principle. If the glass ceiling demonstrates how reluctant studios are to share their success, the glass cliff demonstrates how quick they are to apportion blame. Success might have many parents, but failure always needs a scapegoat. That scapegoat could conveniently be the women and people of color who had only just been allowed to take their shot at the genre.

It's worth noting that pretty much all recent superhero movies have floundered at the box office. However, the failure of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania and Shazam!: Fury of the Gods has not prompted any existential handwringing about the need to retool future projects to focus on fewer white guys. The failure of Quantumania did not lead the studios and press to throw Peyton Reed under the bus in the same way that the performance of The Marvels was blamed on Nia DaCosta. Even today, women directors face longer and harsher sentences in “movie jail.”

The problems facing the superhero movie genre are systemic: overworked visual effects artists, the lack of creative vision, a suffocating sameness, bad editing, and market saturation. They have nothing to do with the people in front of or behind the camera, because those people aren’t making the decisions that matter. As DaCosta explained in press leading up to the release of The Marvels, “It is a Kevin Feige production, it’s his movie.” If there’s a creative problem, that’s where the blame lies.

Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 wasn’t the only live-action superhero film to turn a profit last year because it starred a blonde white guy named Chris. It succeeded because it was a deeply personal story from a filmmaker who was able to express himself through the film. It was personal in a way that these sorts of projects are rarely allowed to be. Madame Web and The Marvels didn’t fail because they featured women; they failed for the same reason Quantumania or Fury of the Gods did.

It's important to define what “superhero fatigue” is, what the term has come to represent. Christopher Lord has defined the term as “a movie that feels like a movie I’ve seen a dozen times before” fatigue. This is admittedly a mouthful, but it feels more accurate. After all, many of the biggest flops of last year were nostalgia plays with no appeal to younger audiences, and many of the biggest successes were properties that were either new to the screen or new to those viewers.

It's worth noting in this context that one way to inject novelty into an existing genre or property is to invite new perspectives on it. Those perspectives can obviously come from anyone and anywhere, but there is a greater likelihood of finding a fresh new angle by broadening the pool of talent that gets to tell their stories. After all, the lived experiences of women and people of colour are likely to be quite different from those of the straight white guys who have defined the genre for decades.

This is what makes it so frustrating that Hollywood seems to be learning all of the wrong lessons from the superhero implosion, with Sony and Amazon retreating from female-perspectives to double-down on Nicolas-Cage-as-Spider-Man. Madame Web was a terrible movie, but it wasn't a terrible movie because of the gender of anybody involved. It was a terrible movie because it was a Spider-Man nativity story that somehow could not directly acknowledge Spider-Man.

In reality, Barbie was the highest-grossing movie of last year, a female-led and female-directed movie built around a product traditionally seen as very feminine. It earned a Best Picture nomination and was a genuine cultural phenomenon. It was just as much a piece of intellectual property brand management as something like The Flash, but the difference was that the studio trusted a creative team to tell a story from that perspective.

The only other superhero film besides Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 3 to crack the box office top ten was Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, a film about Miles Morales (Shameik Moore), a mixed-race Spider-Man, with a diverse creative team. It dealt with themes both universal and specific, speaking to the production team’s unique perspective in a way that remained accessible to wider audiences. It was fresh and exciting. It didn’t feel like a movie the audience had already seen dozens of times.

Just as studios refuse to learn the right lessons from failures, they learn the wrong lessons from successes. Nicolas Cage’s noir-inflected Spider-Man was a delight in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, but there’s no reason why the character spinning off from that needs to be the most prominent white guy. It could be just as fun to have a Peni Parker (Kimiko Glenn) or Spider-Woman (Hailee Steinfeld) project. It remains surreal that Miles Morales has yet to transition to live action.

During the boom years, studios were quick to trumpet their support for diversity and inclusivity. This was true even on streaming, where Netflix invested heavily in a diverse selection of programming. However, when the market begins to contract, it’s that diverse talent that is often the first to be silenced. Studios kowtow to reactionary voices, abandoning principles that it seems they never truly held. This isn’t just morally bankrupt, it’s also bad business.

If the superhero genre is going to weather this storm, it needs to become more diverse – not less. It needs to embrace a wider range of stories and perspectives, and the best way to do that is to include talent with unique stories and distinct perspectives. Audiences have and will continue to consistently respond to that. Madame Web stars Dakota Johnson as a woman with the power to see the future. One doesn’t have to be clairvoyant to see how short-sighted studios are being.