Today on the 5: Emma Roberts recently did an interview about an upcoming film, and during that conversation she attempted to pin the failure of Madame Web on a meme from the trailer. While I admire the gall of that attempt to offset the problem with the film, it's nonsense.
Ozone Nightmare
Nice Try Emma
Welcome to daily five for Tuesday, July 9th, 2024. I don't know if you could tell when I was doing the intro that I was smiling, which I am still, because this has to be one of the most galaxy brain defenses of a bad movie I've heard in quite a while. And it's in regards to what was it last year's? Was it this year? When did Madame? Madame Webb was either whatever, whatever year it was from? Whichever. When it came out, it bombed, rightly so. And recently, one of the actors from the film, Emma Roberts, tried to blame the reception of the film on the fact that there was social media memory done around a line from the film, which most people probably heard. The one where Dakota Johnson says, "Oh, my mom was killed while investigating spiders in the Amazon rainforest, which I'll be honest, as a small side, I never thought that meme was anywhere near as funny as a lot of people did. I mean, it's not great writing, but I never, I don't know, I never got on board with that as far as it being as funny as some people really thought it was." I went, "Oh, okay. Yeah, it's clunky writing. That's the joke. All right. But the movie itself is a train wreck. But let's not pretend that the meme of that line is why this movie wasn't well received. That is nonsense. Snakes on a plane had a memed line. It was not a good movie, but it was a lot of fun and nobody really cared. So you went into that movie knowing what it was and you had a good time with it. If Madam Webb had been that, then I think it would have been much more well received, but it's just not a well-made movie. It has so many problems far beyond the bad writing. That is a problem. Don't get me wrong. But that's one problem among many stacked issues. How about the fact that we are shown superheroes that we never get in the film? How about the fact that the ADR on the main villain is so bad that even people who don't care about movie making will pick up that there is something wrong with that performance? How about a character, a main character who is essentially one of the most unlikable characters in the movie to the point where you almost want the villain to kill her? Yeah, that's the problem. It's not the fact that there's one piece of bad dialogue. Many films, many great films on top of it have bad dialogue, have clunky writing, are not necessarily the most tightly written and perfectly performed scripts you've ever seen. Almost every movie has its low points in terms of where the writing maybe didn't work or that it just doesn't come out that well from what the actor's performance is. That doesn't ruin the movie. Just because something gets memed online, that doesn't ruin a movie, at least not by itself. Generally, it is an indicator of something. If there's nothing else in the trailer for people to fixate on and they only pick one thing that's a piece of bad writing, that might indicate that you didn't have anything else in the trailer that was getting people excited. Also, the fact that this is one of the more bizarre characters to try to build a film around, a character who is fundamentally a secondary or tertiary character but certainly far in the background to try to structure your film around that. I'm not saying it couldn't be done, but this was certainly not the way to do it. Again, this feels like, and look, Emma Roberts's scenes were mostly with what's the actor's name? Adam Scott, who I think was doing great work. Emma was fine in it. I didn't have any problem with her performance. Maybe in what she experienced, the film was good because she was working with some of the people who were doing better work and had some of the better writing and scenes. That is possible. But I don't think any objective individual can look at this film and say, yes, we made a really good movie that works very well for audiences who aren't somehow already endeared to this character. And that audience has to be tremendously small. I don't know a lot of people who are madam web fans. Look, I'm a big fan of the X-Men character, Maggot, which I know you couldn't build a film around. And I think that's probably a bigger fan base than Madam Web, I'm pretty sure. But I would certainly never pitch a film based around the Maggot character because I don't think most people would ever care, and you certainly couldn't ground a film around him. But I think he's a great character because he's so weird. Still, I wouldn't expect to go into a Maggot film. Actually, I would expect it to perform about as well as Madam Web. I would say if they ever make a Maggot film, I would reason, especially if it's Sony, I would guess it'll perform about as well as this one. So this is, I mean, look, it's all marketing, it's all positioning. Maybe Emma Roberts is trying to keep good, you know, good relations with Sony or people involved in the film. So I know there's a whole secondary angle of this thing. But the idea that Madam Web did not perform well and was not well received because the internet took one piece of clunky dialogue among many pieces and mean it? No, I'm sorry. You can try to get away with a lot of things and people might buy it, but this is not going to be one of them. The reason Madam Web wasn't well received, the reason a lot of people didn't like it is because it wasn't a well made film. It's as simple as that. Let's not pretend anything otherwise later.