Mike Flanagan Had The Most Brutally Accurate Review Of ‘Madame Web’

It’s still early, but Madame Web will likely go down as one of the worst movies of 2024. And — this is not too early to say — one of the worst comic book movies of all-time, alongside stinkers like Morbius and Catwoman. The reviews are brutal, but one of the most devastating reviews wasn’t written by a critic. It came from Mike Flanagan, the director of Ouija: Origin of Evil and Gerald’s Game and creator of The Haunting of Hill House and The Fall of the House of Usher.

Flanagan didn’t want to straight up trash the film; that wouldn’t be cool to Madame Web director S. J. Clarkson (who directed a memorable season one episode of Succession, so I don’t put the blame on her). Instead, he found another method. Here is the review, published in full from Flanagan’s personal Letterboxd

We come to this place… for magic.
We come to the theater to laugh, to cry, to care.
Because we need that, all of us:
that indescribable feeling we get when the lights begin to dim,
and we go somewhere we’ve never been before;
not just entertained, but somehow reborn…. together.
Dazzling images, on a huge silver screen.
Sound that I can feel.
Somehow, heartbreak feels good in a place like this.
Our heroes feel like the best part of us,
and stories feel perfect and powerful.

Because here…

They are.

Sound familiar? It’s Nicole Kidman’s speech from her AMC commercial. Flanagan created tags for the review as well, including “exposition to cats,” “fireworks because,” and “wait why is she blind.” He wrote it in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died.

I don’t ask for much, but Mike Flanagan? Please cast Dakota Johnson in your next show. Also, have your next show be about her experience making Madame Web. You can call it The Fall of the House of Spider-Women.

(Via Letterboxd)