Emma Roberts says ‘Madame Web’ flopped because of ‘internet culture’

For Emma Roberts, the true villain of Madame Web wasn’t Ezekiel Sims — it was the internet. 

The actress, who played Spider-Man’s mom, Mary Parker, in the Sony spinoff, told Variety that she thinks the reason the movie tanked so hard at the box office was because of the unpredictability of Hollywood and it being heavily ridiculed online. 

“Things work; things don’t work,” Roberts said. “Everyone likes to act like they can predict if they’re going to work or they’re not. And the truth is, you can’t. Things do badly, and then they blow up later on TikTok. Things do well, but then you watch them, and you’re like, ‘This did well?'”

She added, “There is no secret. It’s about doing something goodish and it hitting at the right time. Everything else is like a wish and a prayer.”

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Set within Sony’s Spider-Man universe, Madame Web follows a paramedic named Cassie (Dakota Johnson) who develops psychic abilities that she must use to protect three teenage girls from being murdered by Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim). The film, which underperformed at the box office, currently holds an 11 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes and a 57 percent audience approval score. 

But Roberts explained that, as an actress, she’s “not intimidated by failure” or “by people having negative thoughts about something” she has starred in during her career. 

“I personally really loved Madame Web. I really enjoyed the movie. I thought everyone in it was great,” she said. “The director, S.J. Clarkson, I think did an amazing job. She’s the reason I wanted to do that movie. If it wasn’t for internet culture and everything being made into a joke, I think that the reception would’ve been different.”

Roberts continued, “And that’s what bums me out about a lot of stuff, even stuff that I’ve done, is people just make such a joke out of everything now.”

To be fair, the internet was poking fun at Madame Web before it even hit theaters after a line in its first trailer — “He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died” — spawned countless memes on social media when it dropped. (The line was absent from the film’s final cut.)

Still, Roberts isn’t letting the negative response to Madame Web dissuade her from taking on future superhero projects. She recently told Comicbook.com that she’d be interested in another comic book role that had “a little more action” in it after playing a regular person in the film. 

The same can’t be said for Johnson, who told Bustle that she “probably will never do anything like [Madame Web] again because I don’t make sense in that world.”

She added, “Sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like, ‘Wait, what?'”