Madame Web wasn’t exactly what Dakota Johnson signed up for

Most interestingly, she notes that “sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like, Wait, what?” This follows previous comments she’d made to The Wrap that “there were drastic changes” made to the script, “And I can’t even tell you what they were.”

Many reviewers sensed that the final result of Madame Web had been tampered with by higher powers: “Tahar Rahimmay may well have had every single utterance dubbed with the worst ADR you’ve seen on a big-budget blockbuster,” The A.V. Club’s Manuel Betancourt observed. Johnson herself lends some credence to the theory of studio sabotage. In these big blockbusters, “decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee. Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms,” she says. “My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit. Even if films start to be made with AI, humans aren’t going to fucking want to see those.”

Johnson may never reveal exactly what the difference is between the Madame Web she signed up for and the one that made it to the screen, but she understands why the movie is being “ripped to shreds.” “Unfortunately,” she confesses, “I’m not surprised that this has gone down the way it has.”