It is the fourth film in Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU) and stars Dakota Johnson in the title role, alongside Sydney Sweeney, Isabela Merced, Celeste O'Connor, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Emma Roberts, and Adam Scott.

Sony Pictures began developing a Madame Web film for its shared universe by September 2019, with Sazama and Sharpless writing the script.

In 1973, in the Amazon rainforest in Peru, a research team led by a pregnant Constance Webb discovers an unidentified spider species with rare healing properties.

Ezekiel, who has limited precognition power and enhanced physical abilities, collects information on three teenage girls: Julia Cornwall, Anya Corazón, and Mattie Franklin.

The group lures Ezekiel to a condemned firework factory and sets up traps to disorient him while Cassie calls for a medical evacuation helicopter to fly to their location.

Jill Hennessy also appears as a National Security Agency agent seduced and killed by Ezekiel, while an uncredited infant portrays Mary's son Peter Parker, whose birth is depicted in the film.

[22][23] The studio was looking to attach a prominent actress such as Charlize Theron or Amy Adams to the project, before hiring a new writer to further develop the film with her in mind.

[21] Grant Hermanns of Screen Rant noted speculation on whether Johnson was playing Cassandra Webb or the younger Julia Carpenter, who was the second character in the comics to be known as Madame Web.

[28] Di Bonaventura explained that Sony decided not to reveal many details about the film ahead of its release because the Madame Web character was not well-known to general audiences.

[35][36][37] Sweeney completed an athletic assessment test and read comics featuring her character, Julia Carpenter, while Johnson underwent training.

[40] Clarkson sought to incorporate a female-led and grounded and gritty tone similar to her work on the Marvel Television series Jessica Jones (2015–2019), and said she was given creative freedom in making the film.

The film was set in 2003 since the initial scripts, and Clarkson sought to give it a "timeless" quality by including music from the 1990s to "the edge of 2003", and by featuring vintage clothing.

[47] Filming occurred using the working title Claire,[37] with Mauro Fiore serving as cinematographer, after previously doing so for Sony's Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021).

[64] The first trailer, released in November 2023, revealed that Merced, O'Connor, and Rahim were respectively portraying Anya Corazón, Mattie Franklin,[65] and Ezekiel Sims.

[9] Sony had performed reshoots for Madame Web by January 2024, which journalist Jeff Sneider reported was to remove references to an originally planned 1990s setting of the film.

Vary later reporting in December 2024 that according to one Sony source, Sony was never precluded by The Walt Disney Company from using Holland in their SSU films, never happening out of a feeling within the studio that audiences wouldn't accept Holland's version of Spider-Man appearing in non-MCU films, especially after the release of No Way Home and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022), which established the definitive boundaries of the MCU's multiverse.

[79] Joshua Rivera of Polygon criticized the trailer for focusing its three-minute runtime on explaining Cassandra Webb's powers and appearing as a "run-of-the-mill 2000s thriller" instead of showcasing the "wildly interesting and truly strange" Spider-Man–related characters.

[97][98] According to the file-sharing news website TorrentFreak, Madame Web was the second most-watched pirated film for the week ending March 25, 2024, and remained in the top ten from April 1—15.

[7][2] In the United States and Canada, Madame Web was released alongside Bob Marley: One Love, and was projected to gross $20–25 million from 4,013 theaters over its six-day opening timeframe.

[5] In the days leading up to its release, theater chains noted a large amount of pre-ordered tickets were canceled after poor critical reviews emerged.

The website's consensus reads: "Madame Web's earnest approach to the title character's origin story has a certain appeal, but its predictable plot and uneven execution make for a forgettable superhero adventure.

[1] Peter Travers of ABC News named the film the worst in Sony's Spider-Man Universe, calling it "God-awful" and "second to none in the dark art of boring you breathless".

Lee felt it was "dumb and schlocky" and comparable to some of the worst superhero films made, reiterating criticisms of the dialogue as "unfunny" and "inelegant" and said the action sequences were "uninvolving".

Likewise, Collin described the film as a "two-hour explosion in a boringness factory, in which the forces of dullness and stupidity combine in new and infinitely perturbing ways".

[117][118][119] In a negative review for Variety, Peter Debruge criticized the plot of Cassie "babysitting the three young ladies" for the majority of the film and called out the "less-than-sly nods to year-2003 consumerism" with the product placement of a vintage Pepsi brand, a classic advertisement for Calvin Klein, and a table dance and fight scene played to the Britney Spears song "Toxic".

He concluded that Madame Web felt like an "extended soda commercial" combined with a "teaser trailer for still more spinoffs", and deemed the film's potential franchise as dead on arrival.

He described it as "marginally competent at its best" and at its worst as "an incoherent mishmash populated by slumming movie stars who make little effort to disguise the dawning realization that they've made a terrible mistake".

[120] The Washington Post's Michael O'Sullivan gave it two-and-a-half stars out of four, saying that it "is no blockbuster, but in its own quiet way, it manages to break down a few barriers",[121] while Charles Pulliam-Moore of The Verge found the film "surprisingly committed to transporting you back to 2003—a golden age for comic book movies that were aggressively mid or worse".

[86] Similarly, Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra blamed critics for Madame Web's box office failure, insisting that the high views on Netflix proved that the film was mistreated.

The report noted that the superhero genre had been in a transition period and that the future reception of their franchise could change depending on whether the next SSU film that was then scheduled for release, Kraven the Hunter, were successful.