According to Variety, Dakota Johnson is joining Sony’s Universe of Marvel characters, as she has been cast as Madame Web in Sony’s next standalone superhero movie.
What’s Happening:
- The casting of Dakota Johnson marks Sony’s first modern comic book adaptation to feature a female in the title role. Insiders close to the project stress that Johnson’s deal is not closed but confirm she is in talks to secure the role.
- S.J. Clarkson, known for her work on Netflix’s Jessica Jones and The Defenders, will be directing Madame Web. Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, the duo behind Jared Leto’s upcoming vampire chiller Morbius, will write the screenplay.
- In the comics, Madame Web is key in the interconnected multiverse. In effect, the mind-bending theory involves multiple versions of characters from different timelines that, in the case of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Spider-Man: No Way Home, can intersect to varying degrees of chaos.
- Web often appears as a side character in Spider-Man comics, where she is depicted as a blind, paralyzed elderly woman who has myasthenia gravis, a chronic autoimmune disorder requiring her to connect to a life support system resembling a spider web.
- The character was introduced in issue 210 of The Amazing Spider-Man comic series in 1980, where she’s a clairvoyant mutant whose abilities prove to be greatly beneficial to Spider-Man and his fellow arachnid allies, like Spider-Woman.
- Madame Web is just one of several Spider-Man related spinoffs in the works at Sony, as they look to diversify their Spidey projects away from the Marvel Cinematic Universe with movies such as Venom and Morbius.