Watching Madame Web just made me miss Birds of Prey

polygon.com:

I didn’t have many expectations when it came to Madame Web, and it was not really a surprise when the movie didn’t meet any of them. The sorta-kinda-maybe?? Sony Spider-Verse tie-in got absolutely horrible reviews and earned a modest $100 million at the global box office. Now that it’s on Blu-ray, 4K SteelBook, and non-premium digital VOD, people might want to see it, if only out of morbid curiosity.

If I’m being honest, it was little more than morbid curiosity that brought me into Madame Web in the first place. Back when it was coming to theaters, I had a delusional moment about what the film could achieve. Seeing the three young heroines masked up and kicking ass under the tutelage of an older woman, I thought perhaps there was something good in this superfluous Spider-adjacent movie. I was raised on magical girl shows, so any prospect of superheroines teaming up excites me!

But Madame Web director S.J. Clarkson does absolutely nothing with her four cool female characters, in spite of the mysterious circumstances that connect them. Sure, she gives us a lot about a tribe of strange Spider-People in the Amazon, but we never actually find out why the protagonists are all tangled up in that web of fate. (Ha.)

One of the more frustrating parts of Madame Web was the tease for Aña Corazón, Mattie Franklin, and Julia Carpenter as superheroes in full spider-powered glory. And yet over the course of this movie, they never get any sort of superpowers. Even though we get a whiff of their personalities and backstories, that’s all shunted aside by the baffling story choices, like protagonist Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson) taking these three endangered superheroes-to-be under her wing, then promptly dumping them on her dear friend Ben Parker for a week while she goes to the Amazon. (You know, where her mother was researching spiders right before she died.)

I left the theater mulling over what could have been. There’s a notable dearth of female leads in modern superhero movies,