Like any superhero movie pushing women as its leads, Madame Web suffered a backlash that was almost strangely proportionate to Morbius—which was actually far worse. The Marvels, too, was panned, along with She-Hulk, in a pattern that suggests when women do “badly,” male fanboys are ready to pounce in such a way so as to ensure that studios are amply aware of it. And oh, how Sony became aware of it, scrapping any future plans to build a franchise out of Madame Web once the box office receipts were in. But what’s most unforgivable about Madame Web isn’t its plotline or even its more than occasionally cheesy dialogue (often rampant with use of ADR). No, instead, it’s certain musical details in particular that will gnaw at anyone versed in both their 00s and Britney history.
First in line on the offending front is the fact that “Toxic,” a single released in January of 2004 is being played when we’re still supposed to be in 2003. And it’s not even like it’s the winter of 2003, well after Spears’ fourth album, In the Zone, was released in mid-November. This can be gleaned by the fact that Cassandra (a rather too on-the-nose name choice for someone who can see into the future) Webb, played by Dakota Johnson, attends a barbeque in some fairly late summer-y clothing (being a Jessica Jones type thanks to S. J. Clarkson’s work in that universe, she’s bound to wear a jacket during any season). In truth, the entire cast dresses in a late summer/early fall manner, so it’s safe to say this is well before “Toxic” or even In the Zone could have conceivably been released.
Another giveaway that we’re still in summer of ’03 territory is the set design of a particular scene that chooses to very deliberately spotlight a looming poster of Beyoncé’s debut album, Dangerously in Love, which only would have been that loud and proud in June of ‘03 (what with New York constantly turning over its ad space), many months before In the Zone came out, not to mention “Toxic” itself, which wouldn’t be released to radio as a single until January of ‘04. Maybe December, if someone wants to truly believe in how “ahead of the curve” New York is. But since we’re clearly somewhere in the summer of ‘03, this little detail just doesn’t quite jive (to use a word that Britney’s erstwhile record label named itself after). This seems to be happening with, dare one say, slight regularity as the 00s slip evermore into the “period piece” category. Saltburn, too, was guilty of such inattention to detail about 2007 in particular, yet it was perhaps more easily forgiven because it ended up being so beloved (in no small part thanks to Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dance Floor”).
As for Madame Web being oddly specific about wanting to set its stage in 2003 (and in case one isn’t immediately sure it’s 2003 based on the quickly-flashed title card, Cassie is shown driving past a Blockbuster in her ambulance), director and co-writer S. J. Clarkson’s reasoning could be twofold: 1) she wanted to start the movie during a flashback to 1973 and then only flashforward thirty years to reveal present-day Cassandra and 2) 2003 is sort of that “sweet spot,” technology-wise. A time when things were advanced enough with phones and computers (hell, Britney was already singing love songs centered on e-mails in 1998, when “E-Mail My Heart” was recorded), but not so advanced that your every move could be tracked, and your face instantly recognized on any CCTV camera.
This, obviously, is why the extremely lame villain of the narrative, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), is obsessed with some “cutting-edge” technology that only the NSA (on especially high alert at that time in the wake of 9/11) has access to. Enough to seduce one of its agents and steal her top-secret access to this “special tech” that would become garden-variety in most people’s phones after 2007. Alas, since we’re still in the “early days” of facial recognition, Ezekiel is sure to include (quite expositorily) in his pillow talk, “But as the years pass, there have been technological advances. New ways to find people if you know their faces [which he does because he has nightly visions of the three Spider-Women who will kill him]. The kind of technology I’ve heard the National Security Agency has been pursuing.”
Once he gets the woman’s security access after poisoning her, he passes the technology off to his “employee,” Amaria (Zosia Mamet, seeming to enjoy roles where she works for dubious people if The Flight Attendant is another indication), who hacks into “the system” to wait for a hit on one or all of these faces: Mattie (Celeste O’Connor), Anya (Isabela Merced) and Julia (Sydney Sweeney). With regard to Sweeney once again going the Euphoria route by playing a teen girl, it bears noting that, at twenty-six, she isn’t all that much younger than “thirty-year-old” Cassandra (Johnson’s actual age is thirty-four). Meanwhile, O’Connor is twenty-five and Merced is twenty-two. Yet it’s Sweeney who the costume designers seem to go out of their way to dress in some interpretation of an 00s teen girl. This tends to mean a lot of Britney looks, including overalls at one point and then, for the majority of the movie, Sweeney’s own riff on a “…Baby One More Time” schoolgirl outfit.
Relying on Cassie and her premonitions after they’re attacked on the train by Ezekiel, the man they’ll keep referring to as “ceiling guy,” the “teens” trust her enough to let her lead them into some secluded woods where no one can track them, technologically anyway. Afterward, Cassie is foolish enough to tell a trio of teen girls to “stay put” (as if), leaving them to go do some more “research” on who this “ceiling guy” is by returning to her apartment and going through her mother’s old journals from 1973. As she conveniently unearths the valuable information that will tell her who Ezekiel is, the trio grows bored and hungry enough to abandon the woods in favor of a diner off the highway. It’s during this scene that Mis-Teeq’s “Scandalous” starts playing. Which would be passable (since it did exist in 2003), one supposes, were it not for the fact that the director then makes it very clear that the song is playing diegetically. Heard by everyone at the diner as they walk in to the tune of “Scandalous” then sounding over the speakers. The same goes for Spears’ “Toxic,” with Mattie even announcing, “I love this song.”
Back in the woods, Cassie returns to find an empty clearing followed by a vision wherein a key part of it is “Toxic” providing the soundtrack as the girls are attacked by “ceiling guy” at the diner they’ve absconded to. Cassie gets an immediate sense of foreboding when time “resets” again and the song’s signature opening notes start to play from her stolen taxi as the DJ declares, “This track is going to be huge! Are you in the zone?” Oddly, though—and despite all the radio pushing when it was actually unleashed on the airwaves—Mis-teeq’s “Scandalous” fared about as well on the charts with less radio rotation. This being another track “technically” in existence in 2003 (when it was released on Mis-Teeq’s second [and last] album, Eye Candy), it didn’t start popping off on U.S. radio until April of 2004. Its “revival,” so to speak, after already being played heavily in the UK and Japan during ‘03, made it ripe, apparently, to feature as the theme song for the Catwoman trailer. Now, call one “batty,” but it seems like a bit of an ill-omened idea not only to include a song from a rival comic book studio’s movie, but also a song from a rival comic book studio’s movie that was received so poorly. Indeed, Catwoman has a lower approval rating than Madame Web (eight percent to the latter’s twelve).
For an even weirder Britney/Mis-Teeq connection within these universes, Spears’ “Outrageous” was actually slated to be the movie’s theme before the pop star injured her leg while filming the video for it (which had nothing to do with Catwoman, but heavily featured Snoop Dogg). This, for one reason or another, led to Catwoman wielding “Scandalous” instead (which is just another word for “outrageous” anyway). But the only thing “scandalous” about Madame Web is its flagrant disregard for the correct radio airplay timeline. Something that the musical supervisors on the movie perhaps assumed would be the least of the audience’s grievances. And though “Toxic” is a great fit for a story about poison-delivering spider-people, due to this petit faux pas, it’s probably more at home as a string arrangement in Promising Young Woman (you know, the movie Emerald Fennell brought us before her own 00s-era inconsistencies in Saltburn).
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