NEED TO KNOW
More than one year after Dakota Johnson’s 2024 superhero movie Madame Web flopped at the box office, the actress is looking back on why the movie didn’t work out.
“It wasn’t my fault,” Johnson, 35, said with a laugh, as she and her Materialists director Celine Song spoke with the Los Angeles Times for an article published Wednesday, June 4. Johnson had been asked whether she was focused on making smaller, indie movies like her new romantic comedy with Song and recent movies like Daddio and Splitsville, which Johnson’s company TeaTime Pictures produced.
“There’s this thing that happens now where a lot of creative decisions are made by committee. Or made by people who don’t have a creative bone in their body,” Johnson said of Madame Web. “And it’s really hard to make art that way. Or to make something entertaining that way. And I think unfortunately with Madame Web, it started out as something and turned into something else. And I was just sort of along for the ride at that point. But that happens. Bigger-budget movies fail all the time.”
Johnson starred alongside Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, Isabela Merced, Tahar Rahim, Mike Epps, Adam Scott and Emma Roberts in Madame Web, one of Sony Pictures’ Spider-Man spinoff movies. The movie follows Johnson’s character Cassandra Webb as she gains clairvoyant abilities that allow her to see the future of characters portrayed by Sweeney, O’Connor and Merced. While the film never directly connects to Tom Holland’s Spider-Man movies, the characters are closely associated with Spider-Man and Peter Parker in many Marvel comic book stories.
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Madame Web received negative reviews from critics and audiences alike and won the 2025 Razzie Awards’ awards for Worst Picture, Worst Screenplay and Worst Actress for Johnson back in February. Despite all the negative attention the movie received, Johnson did not appear concerned with the long-term impact of Madame Web while speaking with the L.A. Times.
“I don’t have a Band-Aid over it,” she said. “There’s no part of me that’s like, ‘Oh, I’ll never do that again’ to anything. I’ve done even tiny movies that didn’t do well. Who cares?”
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In Materialists, Johnson strays far from superhero fare and instead portrays a New York City matchmaker whose love life becomes caught between two men: an ex named John (Chris Evans) who she reconnects with on the same night she meets a new man named Harry (Pedro Pascal).
“I think a lot of what I read these days is void of soul and heart, and [writer-director Song] is all soul and heart,” Johnson told the L.A. Times of the movie, when asked why she has not made more romantic comedies. “I really love a rom-com if it feels like I can connect to the people in it. And I think I’ve found it hard to connect to the people in some of the ones that I’ve been offered.”
Materialists is in theaters June 13.
