Madame Web’s Box Office Failure Joins 4 Rare MCU Instances

Debuted on February 14th, 2024, Madame Web had its terrible flop time as people walked away from the theater. With the main lead Dakota Johnson, it has been going around that her leading was one of the major aspects as to why the movie failed.

Madame Web made $17.6 million in its opening weekend, and for its 6-day opening, it only grossed $25.8 million (yikes). Even though the movie only cost $80 million to make, the revenue was quite a bummer. It’s a new low for Sony’s Spider-Man Universe which earned even less than what Morbius made, which was another disappointing result of $39.1 million in its three-day debut.

It’s especially rare to see a Marvel film missing its usual No.1 spot, and it has only ever happened to four MCU movies, including Elektra, Dark Phoenix, 2015’s Fantastic Four, and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. Sony did want to avoid such a disaster, since after the trailer went viral with negative reviews, they did everything to save the movie, but it lost to Bob Marley: One Love.

After the trailer, memes, and jokes were revolving around it, and every other platform started to boo this movie for having a bland plot and weaker acting. Such a poor portrayal of the movie also played a major role in scaring the people away from the theater. Madame Web holds a 56% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 13% critic score, indicating a bleak future, just like the other 4 movies that failed to reach number 1 in their opening weekend.

From this table, it’s evident that the lowest was Elektra and the highest was Dark Phoenix, but it’s still a failure because of rotten critic scores from Rotten Tomatoes, a review aggregator website.

Based on the current flop, the future outlook for Madame Web is devoid of fame. The audience already has less faith in Sony’s Spider-Man universe, and after doing the basic math, the movie is nowhere near to making around $200 million worldwide at the box office, because it was made for less than a hundred million. If the debut week flopped, it is rare to see movies picking up after a terrible fall.

So, now that Sony deserves a win, we hope its next film, Kraven the Hunter, makes it big because it’s going to be a major loss for Sony Pictures. But as for now, only time will tell.

Gary Wilson

Gary is a geeky-binge watcher who loves to pen down all that he watches. The night-owl has just got two hobbies, binge-watching all the latest shows and writing everything about them.