Just because a film is a box office hit doesn’t mean it’ll be a hit on streaming. In fact, sometimes the opposite is true. Sometimes a film will bomb at the box office but create such curiosity that, when it hits streaming, people are willing to give it a shot anyway. Then, weeks or months later, that bomb is now suddenly a hit, just by a different metric.
A recent example of that is the 2024 film Madame Web. According to Bloomberg, the Dakota Johnson Spider-Man spin-off (pun intended) was Sony Pictures’ most-streamed movie on Netflix last year, beating all of the studio’s biggest box office hits such as Venom: The Last Dance and It Ends With Us. Each of those films grossed around $145 million domestically, while Madame Web grossed closer to $44 million. It also sports a more than warranted 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which certainly didn’t help.
Almost instantly after release, though, the film seemed to gain cult classic status, getting recognition on podcasts like How Did This Get Made and more. That it was so bad gave it name recognition, and when it started showing up on Netflix, people watched. The same carries over to Sony’s fifth best streaming title last year, Kraven the Hunter, another ill-conceived Spidey spinoff that made even less money than Madame Web.
These stats come as part of a larger article about Sony trying to figure out a way to get more money from its streaming bombs. As it stands now, its current deal with Netflix is based on how much a film makes at the box office. But if the movies that make less are doing better on streaming, clearly, there’s money being left on the table. It’s a whole thing, which you can read about here.
What we care most about, though, is the simple, basic lunacy that Madame Web can be considered, in a very cut-and-dry metric, a hit. Who could have seen that coming? Nobody—except, of course, Madame Web herself.
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