Does Marvel’s ‘Madame Web’ portend the decline of the superhero genre?

It is quite the paradox: just when the fate of superhero movies is more unpredictable than ever, Marvel’s latest heroine can tell the future. The newest release from the hitherto prolific and profitable factory, Madame Web, faces an opaque, difficult to decipher crystal ball in the face of the evident decline of a genre that has saturated the screens in recent years. The main purpose of the film is to introduce a new character located in the orbit of Spider-Man — or, to be exact, in what is known as Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, that is, the franchise created by Columbia Pictures, Marvel Entertainment and Sony Pictures through an amalgamation of films (Venom, Morbius) that revolve around characters connected to the adventures of Spider-Man.

And so we come to this Madame Web, inspired by a secondary character — a blind old woman with the gift of clarivoyance — that was created in 1980 by Denny O’Neil and John Romita, Jr., and that now revives in the skin of Dakota Johnson, who lives in the New York City of the early 21st century and is not an old woman at all. After a prologue in the Peruvian Amazon jungle where the new heroine’s mother gives birth, the story is set in a world of nostalgic innocence. In her Dr. Martens boots and her flea market leather jacket, Cassie Webb, a lonely urbanite who only appreciates the company of her cat, drives an ambulance in a city that still clings to the last decade of the 20th century. Her powers are presented in the premonitory wake of déjà vu, and quite fittingly: everything that happens on the screen also feels like something that the viewer has seen before.

Curious how the traces of the past are presented through advertising icons, be it a Calvin Klein advertisement in the middle of an action sequence or the ubiquitous Pepsi-Cola. Once again, brands are used as global references of a supposed popular culture presented as heritage for new generations uncritical of consumption, who, apparently, are only able to navigate with the help of corporate iconography.

Most of all, Madame Web is a film that foretells the arrival of a squad of teenage superheroines whose broad strokes are accompanied by references as unoriginal as Britney Spears’ Toxic, included in the album In The Zone — which also included Everytime, a song that another group of lost teenagers sang and danced to in Harmony Korine’s wild and nihilistic Spring Breakers, which more than a decade ago foreshadowed the dangers of millennial disaffection.

Directed by SJ Clarkson, an impersonal director seasoned in television, Madame Web remains in a sort of limbo, between the mere advancement of the interests of a franchise and that déjà vu shielded by the brands. If there is something that rescues this movie is precisely Dakota Johnson, an actress with the authentic aura of a star, capable of making a film such as this, wrapped in the decadence of a genre unable to escape the trap of its own web, bearable.

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