Photos: FOX, UNIVERSAL, SONY ; Illustration: Dillen Phelps

Credit where it’s due: The new superhero-adjacent, Spider-Man-related, Marvel Comics-associated movie Madame Web does something different with a sub-genre that’s become familiar. That’s not to say that Madame Web is blazingly original or even particularly good. But at a time when the official Marvel Cinematic Universe is well into the process of devouring its own tail and its DC equivalent is on a break before another hard reboot, Sony’s Madame Web, vaguely designed to follow in the tradition of Spider-Man-without-Spider-Man movies like Venom and Morbius, seeks inspiration elsewhere. Though its central character has visions of the future, this movie sets its own sights 20 years in the past: Madame Web is set in 2003, and it doesn’t just evoke that year through needle drops (The first Yeah Yeah Yeahs EP! The earliest days of Britney’s “Toxic”!). It largely recreates the aesthetic and sensibility of a 2003 superhero movie, from its bold stylistic choices to its baffling narrative tweaks. It even opened on Valentine’s Day – the 21st anniversary of Daredevil, the first of that year’s three major superhero entries, which also included Hulk and X2.

Today, that doesn’t seem especially bountiful; even in 2024, a relatively off year for superhero projects, Sony alone is putting out three of these not-quite-Spider-Man movies, and we’ll also see Deadpool, Wolverine, and the Joker on screen before year’s end. 21 years ago, however, three in a single year was a lot, the first real sign that the success of 2000’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man were more than a passing novelty. At the same time, the MCU was still five years away, and DC’s competing version was a full decade off. So what did it mean to be a 2003 superhero movie, and what does it mean that Madame Web evokes one?

In terms of narrative, it means dancing around a bunch of comic book mythology while also making enough references to it to keep devotees happy. Back in 2003, this was done out of fear that mainstream audiences would blanch at some of the weirder, comic-bookier concepts – probably well-founded, to be honest, in the case of the X-Men movies, which streamline and simplify a lot of mutant-world mythology in a way that makes the first two movies both snappy and accessible. (The reason we get to see Hugh Jackman don the iconic yellow Wolverine suit in this summer’s Deadpool sequel, 24 years after the first X-movie, is because Jackman did such a great job in the first place making Wolverine seem like a person, rather than a squat, caricatured cartoon character.) Compiling a bunch of important Daredevil-related characters and storylines into a single movie proved more challenging.

Madame Web performs a similarly awkward maneuver for a very different set of reasons. Sony made a deal with the Disney-owned Marvel some years ago, essentially leasing their Spider-Man rights back to the MCU for a series of movies, while Sony could continue to make other Spider-Man projects, like the animated Spider-Verse movies and these weird live-action spinoffs. The spinoffs therefore are torn between wanting to flaunt their connection to one of the most popular characters in the world and wanting to provide enough context to better explain the whole deal with Venom, Morbius, or Madame Web. It’s a particularly tall order for Cassandra Webb (Dakota Johnson), who in the movie has a near-death experience that unlocks her latent clairvoyance. She uses her powers to save a trio of young women menaced by a spider-like figure. To populate Cassandra’s world, the movie draws heavily on Spider-Man comics characters – by my count, using at least seven – without actually allowing Spider-Man himself to show up (at least not in a traditional way). Somehow this sparks the confounding decision to tee up three different characters who become three different iterations of the hero Spider-Woman in the comics… and then not have any of them actually suit up for the movie. Making a movie about future superheroes who then do not don their costumes or mention their heroic identities out of fear that it will confuse audiences or cost too much money is almost more 2003 than 2003 itself, with a touch of the save-it-for-the-sequel magical thinking that has hobbled movies for years at this point.

On the plus side, throwing back to 2003 means escaping the same basic visual template that informs so many later-period MCU films. Admittedly, Madame Web has neither the visual invention of Hulk nor the propulsive confidence of X2. It has more in common with the darkly shimmery fake-ass New York of Daredevil, full of similarly canted angles and show-offy camera moves meant to put the audience in the hero’s point of view. Speaking of which: Early 2000s superhero movies are also fond of shots that use CG to zoom straight into the human body, so Madame Web obliges by swirling around Cassandra’s visions, essentially doing the same for her brain. It’s very silly. At the same time, Madame Web is more interesting to look at than many of its MCU cousins; it’s convincingly nocturnal, with pervasively deep blacks and a red neon-sign glow in multiple scenes. Cinematographer Mauro Fiore, who seemed hamstrung by the washed-out house style he had to use on Spider-Man: No Way Home, gives the movie an antsy, splotchy visual tone that draws the eye around the frame, much as the darkly saturated garishness of Daredevil makes it an oddly transfixing experience two decades later. It’s nowhere near Hulk, but it’s animated by a similar impulse to really translate the weird energy of a comic book onto the big screen, even if the character’s story has been drastically altered.

Is this all just automatic nostalgia, like when a song you used to hate sounds more comforting after a decade-long break? (Say, for example, “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence, as seen in the feature film Daredevil?) I admit it may well be some form of middle-aged dotage allowing me to smile when Madame Web takes two different detours into generic forested settings, where Fox used to chuck its superheroes to save money on superhero pictures that followed the class of 2003, like Elektra (spinoff of Daredevil) and X-Men: The Last Stand (follow-up to X2). This is not the right direction for a superhero movie. But its wrongness acts as an extremely temporary, barely-acting balm. The state of the superhero movie was not exactly better in 2003, but it was more promising, with the X-Men finally realized on screen and Ang Lee given the room to experiment with the Incredible Hulk, decisions that weren’t treated as make-or-break moments of truth. As the Daredevil of 2024, Madame Web seems unlikely to inspire future superhero experiments. But it could help free these heroes from the tyranny of cultural ubiquity.  

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.