The world must know how Sydney Sweeney feels about Madame Web
Seeing as no one can be normal about her, we must know how Sydney Sweeney feels about her experiences researching spiders in the Amazon
Aux News Sydney Sweeney
Photo: Frazer Harrison
In between starring in a romantic comedy that actually made money and sending the internet into a tailspin for having breasts, Sydney Sweeney has had some explaining to do. Like, does she know that she was in Madame Web, the first bad superhero movie? Of course, she does. In fact, she’s already answered for it, telling The Los Angeles Times some weeks back that she was “just hired as an actor” and “happy to bring to life a character that my little cousins are excited about.” That’s nice, but it’s not enough. The culture’s hunger to get Sweeney to say something negative about her co-workers must be satiated.
Speaking with GQ, Sweeney had a new excuse for being in a bad movie: Her career. As it turns out, actors must act in order to make money, and sometimes, when an industry is so focused on a particular type of product, even a movie about a psychic spider-woman, which sounds like a winner on paper, stumbles out the gate. Ever the pro, Sweeney sees some projects, like Madame Web, as “strategic business decisions,” saying Web was a “building block” that helped her forge her relationship with Sony. Thanks to Madame Web, she was able to sell Anyone But You and get Barbarella.
Sweeney has long been upfront about her business acumen. In 2022, she responded to criticism over her penchant for posting sponcon on Instagram, forcing her to admit that she, sadly, is not one of those “nepo babies” running amok around Hollywood and the dictionary. She has bills to pay. “If I just acted, I wouldn’t be able to afford my life in L.A,“ Sweeney said in 2022. “I take deals because I have to.” The actor is very wealthy by most standards and likely doing better than when she told The Hollywood Reporter she doesn’t have the income to take a six-month break. But she still has to work for a living. Sometimes, that means being in a stupid movie.
Are Sweeney or Dakota Johnson actually responsible for signing on to a movie with as stupid a premise as Madame Web? That’s hard to say. Haven’t we, as a culture, told Hollywood for more than a decade that we want Spider-Man movies and lots of them? That we are so hungry for them that we’ll admit to having some nostalgia for The Amazing Spider-Man? Didn’t a movie featuring many of the concepts and characters from Madame Web just get nominated for an Oscar? No star is immune from failure, especially if they’re wading into the deteriorating world of superhero movies. There isn’t much more to it than superhero movies were hot and studios were willing to cut big deals to get popular actors in them. But hey, talking about Madame Web still beats investigating the actual debate over whether Sweeney’s boobs are killing wokeness.
59 Comments
I don’t blame actors for taking a paycheck on a bad movie. But it’s crazy to act as if Madame Web was a promising movie, because it features “ many of the concepts and characters” as Across the Spider-Verse. By this logic, it’s equally likely that Battlefield Earth and Alien would be successful, because they’re both, like, movies about aliens and space.
And does it feature many of the concepts and characters as Across the Spider-Verse? It has that movie’s version of Madame Webb—Dakota Johnson’s character, which is supposed to make the elderly comics version relevant; it has Sweeney’s character, who in the comics becomes the second Madame Webb (and before that Arachne and before that the second Spider-Woman) after the first one bites the dust; it has the third Spider-Woman; it has Araña (who goes on to be the third Spider-Girl); it has Z-list spider villain Ezekiel Sims; and it has Mary and Ben Parker, best known as relatives to Peter. Like, I guess those would constitute “many of the concepts and characters”, but literally who gives a shit about any of them?
Right. It would be like saying we should make a movie about Will Ferrell’s executive character from Barbie, because people loved Barbie and the character was in Barbie.
Better than doing it for nothing.
Madame Web should have been the super-hero version of Cocoon we were promised.
Silly man-animal.
“Seeing as no one can be normal about her”- The AV Club
How many have they said that about, anyway? I know they said it about Swift too.
And Justin Timberlake is worse than Hitler, somehow. What, you don’t know why? Why, all the cool pop-culture sites are talking about it, and if you don’t know why he’s worse than Hitler- well, I’m not going to bother explaining it to you. Also, you claim you can the Emperor’s junk swinging hither and yon as he parades down the street? Nonsense. He’s perfectly clothed in the finest garments only the truly cultured can see.
Well you’d never see Hitler putting his dick in a box.
Wrong. He put it in Eva Braun’s.
Nothing argues better against a website overstating its takes than overstating your own.
Back in your basement, Multi.
Sorry they criticized your boyband idol.
I think it’s her cheeks. Hollywood tends to promote actors with high, angular cheekbones, but every so often someone enters the spotlight with slightly round cheeks, and people lose their minds. I remember when Michelle Williams debuted on Dawson’s Creek – same thing.
Wait, Sydney Sweeney has a face?
Q: What do Christmas and Sydney Sweeney’s boobs have in common?A: Conservatives very mistakenly believe liberals hate them.
“Q: What do Christmas and Sydney Sweeney’s boobs have in common?”A: Charles Dickens was instrumental in popularising them. Long story…
Santa comes…
Poe wrote on them?Oh wait wrong riddle.
“Wrote” on them? Sure.
Q: What do Christmas and Sydney Sweeney’s boobs have in common?A: They both bring out my yule log?
I try to keep the spirit of both with me, all through the year.
I think as a liberal, I can speak as an authority on this subject and assure conservatives that I do not, in fact, hate Sydney Sweeney’s boobs.
I’d rather let them think liberals hate them if it means we get more of them.
Elon Musk begins posting hardcore porn to Twitter going “I’m owning them so bad right now hahaha”
See when people talk about how there is no longer any common political ground…they’re obviously not taking Sydney Sweeney’s boobs into account.
People are saying that Turner D. Century is the linchpin of the Spider-Verse and a film featuring him is a masterpiece in waiting. Go for it Sony, these not Spider-Man movies couldn’t get any worse…
I’d just like to take this opportunity duly note your steady dedication to a theme dudebra. I appreciate that, felt like I should share.
I’m so happy that I have found this calling and the support of my peers makes it that much more worthwhile.
She’s an attractive young women that seems to have her head on straight and in the game.
Let the sniping and hate commence?
‘Tis a pity she’s a . . . wait, well . . . she seems alright.
Plus her rationale for appearing in Web makes perfect sense – she used the experience to form relationships within Sony that are now helping her get her second more personal project made (while also unexpectedly making more than $200MM for Disney with a romcom). MW may lose money but combined with Anyone but You the Sweeney experiment has worked pretty well for Sony thus far.
“we must know how Sydney Sweeney feels about her experiences researching spiders in the Amazon”Um, but she didn’t do that. Dakota Johnson and Kerry Bishe did that.
I think this post needs to breath. Take a moment, remember that sun still shines, the grass still grows and so on and so forth…
“But hey, talking about Madame Web still beats investigating the actual debate over whether Sweeney’s boobs are killing wokeness.”Reading the article linked there was a salient reminder that however dumb you think the discourse online is, it actually turns out to be dumber.
I used to be a woke SJW until I took a Sidney Sweeney’s boobs to the knee.
What’s funny about Madam Web in general is that Captain Marvel is equally as bad but no one stood up for poor Dakota Johnson like a lot of keyboard warriors did for Brie Larson. Granted, they didn’t actually go see Captain Marvel in the theater either but they still defended it as “fun”.
Did they though, I remember and still hear hate for Brie Larson online. Personally I like Brie, and to be fair the only thing that rubs me the wrong way a bit was an interview from years ago with her recounting a story of going through I think airport security, and one of the TSA guys asking for her number and how she was personally offended by that. TBH being personally offended by a guy just trying to shoot his shot is a bit overly dramatic IMO.
Nah this is a troll. I’m not huge on Brie Larson and Carol is the worst Captain Marvel but The Marvels was, indeed, fun. It probably should have been a D+ series instead of a movie but at least it wasn’t 3 hours long.
lol morning brain fog. Yeah I enjoyed Captain Marvel, 909’s kid, and the Marvels was fun, not great but fun.
I totally agree it would have worked much better on D+
Yeah it would have let some of the choppier parts breath a bit. An episode set on that planet where everyone sings would have been cool.
The Marvels was hardly great but it had kernels of good. Madame Web was nothing but shameless nods to material Sony doesn’t fully control and awful writing. The decision to make Sweeney and the others 14-16 year old little girls was really strange- someone on set clearly just wanted to see SS in a school girl outfit
When I watched it I kept wondering how long ago did they film it? Was it another situation like The New Mutants where they sat on it for 4 years before finally releasing it? Turns out they did sit on it for over a year as principle filming ended in fall of ‘22.
Yeah it felt that way to be sure
The take that these movies are equivalent is fucking absurd outside of incel Reddit.
Just watched it. I wouldn’t put The Marvels at the best of the MCU, but it handled the multiple character dance MUCH more coherently than, say, Wakanda Forever. The biggest actual complaint backed by more than just “Elon told me woke sucks” is that they essentially shoehorned in the Flerkin ex Machina storyline in a way that made it obvious it wasn’t part of the original story they were trying to tell.But sure, toxic misogynist idiots gotta toxic misogynist idiot.
Dakota Johnson’s, “I am so exhausted by being so much smarter than everyone” schtick is growing old.Brie seems OK by comparison
Whaat. Captain Marvel wasn’t nearly as bad as Madame Web. I may have enjoyed Web more cause I was laughing at it’s unintentional humor. But it’s an absolute disaster of a movie. Captain Marvel was, fine as I remember? I liked Talos and the not-cat.
“Didn’t a movie featuring many of the concepts and characters from ?”I mean, poop was once food, that doesn’t mean I want to eat it.
Mickle Mantle’s corpse is doing a disappointingly poor job batting for my baseball team.
You need to hire yourself a better necromancer.
That’s always been my problem.
Yeah you really gotta do your homework, trash necros are a dime a dozen.
I’d rather see her in little outfits, but ok, if I must.
Man, the *work* being done to make this otherwise nondescript person a movie star. It’s exhausting to hear about.
Sorry, are the media and general public ever “normal” with respect to celebrities?!
we are so hungry for them that we’ll admit to having some nostalgia for The Amazing Spider-Man? Meh-level snark. ASM2 is indeed terrible, but 1 is pretty great, and much better than Spider-Man 3 or even 1. (Fight me on that if you must, but first consult your old Roger Ebert reviews, where he gave ASM1 3.5/4 stars. That dude knew movies.)