28 years ago the Spider-Man animated series got really weird—thanks to Madame Web
When Sony agreed to share the movie rights to Spider-Man with Disney and Marvel Studios, it decided to capitalize on the MCU’s success with the character by developing a series of Spider-Man-adjacent films without Spider-Man. Some of these make perfect sense, since Venom is so popular that he can carry a movie easily, but other ideas … made less sense. S.J. Clarkson’s Madame Web seems to fall into the latter camp, with its focus on one of the most obscure Marvel Comics character to ever appear in a movie—let alone be the title character—but longtime Spider-fans who grew up on the 1994 animated series will know that this is far from the first time that Madame Web showed up and made everything weird.
In the comics, Madame Web is an elderly blind woman with telepathic abilities who is confined to an elaborate life support chair. In the movie, Dakota Johnson plays her as a woman who develops clairvoyant abilities that are somehow tied to a killer in a Spider-Man suit and a group of young women who all seem destined to become Spider-people. It is, without judging Madame Web at all yet, an odd choice, but that might be a good thing. It could speak to Sony having confidence in this story rather than the mad desperation that Morbius gave off.
Having confidence in the story seems like exactly what happened when Madame Web first appeared in the ’90s Spider-Man cartoon, which—up until then—had been a largely straightforward (if aggressively and gleefully comic book-y) take on the Wall-Crawler and the world of ’90s animated superheroes. But by the show’s third season, Peter Parker was becoming disillusioned with the superhero life and started having visions of a “fortune teller” in a spider-chair who knew all about him, his secret identity, and his growing tendency toward whiny self-pity.
After nudging him in the direction of a little girl who had unending faith in Spider-Man, Madame Web properly introduced herself and explained that Spider-Man needed to be ready for a mysterious challenge that he would face in the future. Madame Web reappeared throughout that season, giving Spider-Man vague lessons about becoming a better hero and a better man, all in the name of this great challenge coming in the future.
That wouldn’t get paid off until a whole year—and a whole season and a half—later, when Madame Web reappeared and forced Peter into a version of the iconic Secret Wars comic book storyline from the mid-‘80s. It turns out that Madame Web wasn’t “just” a telepathic spider-themed woman who is weirdly invested in Spider-Man’s private life, she was actually a cosmic entity allied with an omnipotent being called The Beyonder who wanted to stage an elaborate test to see if “Good” is more powerful than “Evil.”
None of that was completely unthinkable (again, the show was gleefully comic book-y even before it went totally nuts), but imagine flipping on the TV on a Saturday morning to see a show called Spider-Man and seeing him hanging out with Storm from the X-Men, Captain America, and the Fantastic Four as they fight Doctor Doom, the Lizard, Doc Ock, and the Red Skull on a bizarre, monster-filled alien planet. And all of that was spun out from the appearance of one character, Madame Web, and none of it would fully make sense unless you had kept up with a small plot thread running through multiple seasons of the show—and, don’t forget, this was in the ’90s, when you had to watch a show when it was actually on (unless you had the money and storage space needed for a weighty VHS collection).
But Madame Web wasn’t even done there. Having already turned a cartoon about Spider-Man into a crossover team-up epic, she then sent Peter Parker to an alternate universe where that world’s version of Spider-Man had bonded with the evil Carnage symbiote and destroyed New York. Before the so-called Spider-Carnage could destroy all of reality, though, Madame Web sent our Spider-Man some allies: a bunch of Spider-Men from other universes … which is to say, other Spider-Verses.
Yes, because of the involvement of Madame Web, the Spider-Man cartoon pulled an Into The Spider-Verse decades before that movie came out (and many years before the Spider-Verse comic book storyline that the movie was based on). Better yet, it’s eventually revealed that one of the Spider-Men is not a Spider-Man at all, but the actor who plays Spider-Man on TV in his universe (where Spider-Man is a fictional character). As a final reward for saving reality, Madame Web sends our Spidey into that universe and introduces him to none other than his co-creator, Stan Lee.
Unless Madame Web involves Dakota Johnson meeting Dakota Johnson and trying to save an alien planet from an evil Dakota Johnson, then it seems like the movie couldn’t possibly be as weird as the character’s first big appearance outside of the comics. But it would be cool if it did! As Marvel Studios keeps banking on superheroes being mainstream, superhero stories keep getting sanded down and simplified until they’re boring and predictable. If nothing else, Madame Web’s embrace of weirder concepts and characters is hopefully an encouraging sign for the future of the genre.
