Outgoing Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra has claimed Madame Web fared poorly at the box office “because the press just crucified it”.
Vinciquerra, who is stepping down on 2 January, insisted that the superhero film starring Dakota Johnson and Sydney Sweeney wasn’t bad at all.
“Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It wasn’t a bad film and it did great on Netflix,” he told the Los Angeles Times.
The CEO also included Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Russell Crowe, in the list of films he claimed were “destroyed” by critics.
“For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of Kraven and Madame Web and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit,” he said. “These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”
The Independent critic Clarisse Loughrey gave Madame Web a single star. “Madame Web is an $80m (£63m) film with the quality of an unlicensed superhero painted on the side of a carnival ride,” she wrote. “It is desperate and seems embarrassed of itself, the pained shrug of a creative team ordered by Sony executives to keep the wheels turning in their Spider-Man-adjacent universe, all while the actual Spider-Man is out on loan to Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.”
Louis Chilton put it in the so-bad-it’s-good category but overall agreed. “Bizarre new Marvel adaptation hits all the wrong buttons. A disaster like this is mesmerising to watch,” he wrote.
Kraven the Hunter, which released this month, too received a single star from Loughrey. “Aaron Taylor-Johnson (shoeless and feral) and Russell Crowe (tiny scarf) scrape the barrel of comic book adaptations in this strange, sloppy and long-delayed mess,” she said.
Madame Web grossed $100m at the global box office while Kraven the Hunter made box office history for having the worst opening weekend of any Sony Marvel film, making only $26m globally.
Sony did enjoy success with the Venom franchise, which became a sleeper hit when it launched in 2018.
The first Venom made $856.1m while the 2021 sequel Venom: Let There Be Carnage amassed $506.8m.
The third and final entry in the series, Venom: The Last Dance, has grossed $475.5m since being released earlier this year.
