The end of big-screen cinema? What Netflix hopes to achieve by buying Warner Bros | Andrew Pulver

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IP success stories such as Barbie and the DC Universe? That elusive best picture Oscar? Or perhaps the main goal is a good old-fashioned blockbuster Corporate Hollywood has undergone huge upheavals in recent years – as consequential, perhaps, as the 1970s and 80s, when the studio marques that had made their names in the movies’ golden age were being bought up by international conglomerates. The acquisition of Warner Bros – legendary for crime pictures in the 40s and 50s, and Batman movies in the 90s and 00s – by a streaming service feels particularly significant, coming as it does on the back of the merger of Paramount with Skydance Media earlier this year and, in 2019, Disney’s purchase of fellow studio 21st Century Fox . What is most evident in all these deals is how streaming services have changed the game. Disney’s buying spree – which had previously included Marvel, Star Wars and Pixar – in retrospect looks essentially like preparatory positioning to increase the marketability ...
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Madame Web review – Marvel’s junky spin-off is a tangled mess

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Dakota Johnson lazily leads an incompetent attempt to set up a new character, made almost incoherent by last-minute changes

It was an inevitable collapse after a reign of such unwarranted length and unparalleled indulgence, superhero movies totalling eight a year during the 2010s, a lucrative yet tiresome stronghold. There were brief highlights within the flurry but such lazy overreliance left little room for other blockbuster genres to flourish and led studios to scrape barrels, giving us more and more of something we’d ultimately had enough of. Last year saw an overwhelming rejection (The Flash, Shazam 2, The Marvels, Ant-Man 3, Aquaman 2 all underperforming) and now the fallout, the first of the year doubling up as a Powerpoint presentation on what went wrong and how not to fix it.

Developed back in 2019, given a green light in 2020, filmed during 2022 and then allegedly undergoing reshoots last year, Madame Web was envisioned as a way to extend Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man universe: a business, if not creative, sense decision after the surprise success of both Venom and Into the Spider-Verse in 2018. An elderly clairvoyant known in the comics for assisting Spider-Man is now turned into a young paramedic, played by Dakota Johnson, who doesn’t even know that Spider-Man exists, in a film desperate to pretend that it’s something it isn’t. Such confusion was on display in the launch of last year’s trailer, immediately going viral for its laughably unsure tone, convoluted plot and checked-out leading lady. Grimly aware of the sea shift, it’s now being referred to as a gritty suspense thriller in press materials with Johnson insisting during press that it’s a standalone movie in its own standalone universe.

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