Dakota Johnson is Happy to Joke About Madame Web Being One of Hollywood’s Worst Ever Flops

Madame Web star Dakota Johnson has joked about her widely-panned superhero movie’s status as a box office bomb.

Appearing as the host of this week’s Saturday Night Live, Johnson humorously noted that she had last fronted the show back in 2024 while promoting the Spider-Man spinoff. And now, she continued, she was still trying to promote Madame Web — as the movie was still trying to turn a profit.

“The last time I was here I was promoting a movie called Madame Web, thank you,” Johnson said to muted applause. “And tonight I’m still promoting it because the movie still hasn’t made any money yet.”

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Madame Web is infamously bad, even in a run of films from Sony that also includes Morbius and Venom 3. It made $100.5 million at the box office from a gross budget of $100 million (although factoring in distributor costs is believed to still made a loss). It was also a disaster critically: the subject of widespread memes online and a 10% approval on Rotten Tomatoes. It later scooped three Golden Raspberry awards, including Worst Actress for Johnson herself.

While the film did not make a lot of cash, Madame Web is a long way from ranking among Hollywood’s worst box office bombs — or even the worst-performing comic book movie. Disney’s John Carter is widely-regarded as the biggest commercial failure of all time, losing up to $200 million. Disney’s The Lone Ranger lost up to $190 million, meanwhile. Just behind those was The Marvels, which lost a similar amount and remains the worst-performing comic book movie ever — a fate Madame Web avoided by being far cheaper to make.

“Madame Web has the makings of an interesting hybrid,” we wrote in IGN’s Madame Web review, which returned a 5/10 score. “But with a script overcrowded with extraneous characters, basic archetypes, and generic dialogue, it fails the talent and the future of its onscreen Spider-Women.”

Earlier this year, Sony Pictures boss Tom Rothman acknowledged that “the audience wasn’t satisfied enough” with its live-action Spider-Man spinoff movies. Starting with Hardy’s Venom in 2018, the full roster included that film, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius, Madame Web, Venom: The Last Dance, and Kraven the Hunter. Sony had, at one point, planned to integrate Spider-Man into the villain-led offshoots, though such a crossover never came to fruition.

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Tom Phillips is IGN’s News Editor. You can reach Tom at tom_phillips@ign.com or find him on Bluesky @tomphillipseg.bsky.social