Adam Scott is unsure if another comic book movie is in his future. The Severance star played paramedic Ben Parker — the brother-in-law of the pregnant Mary Parker (Emma Roberts), a.k.a. Spider-Man’s mom — in 2024’s Madame Web, starring Dakota Johnson as the titular clairvoyant. The Sony-made Marvel movie, which was panned by critics and audiences alike, bombed at the box office and grossed just $100 million worldwide. After playing Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben in the Spider-Man spinoff (and dressing up as Batman in the NBC sitcom Parks and Recreation), can Scott see himself making another comic book movie?
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“I don’t know. Never say never,” Scott told ComicBook in an interview pegged to season 2 of his hit Apple TV+ series Severance. “I’m not sure. I think that it’s a genre that I, certainly, as an audience member, participate in. I like seeing all those movies, I watch them all.”
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While promoting Madame Web, Scott described himself as a former “comic book nerd” who grew up buying comics from the Atlantis Fantasyworld comic book shop in California.
“I was really into comics as a kid. I actually grew up in Santa Cruz, California, where they shot Lost Boys. And the comic book store in [1987’s The Lost Boys] was the comic book store that I would go to just about every day to get all my latest comic books,” Scott revealed on The Jess Cagle Show. “And my next door neighbor owned it, Joe Ferrara, and so I would go in there every day, and he would have the latest comics that I was interested in.”
Although the S.J. Clarkson-directed film set up a potential sequel — with Johnson’s blind clairvoyant Cassandra Webb mentoring Spider-Women Julia Cornwall (Sydney Sweeney), Anya Corazón (Isabela Merced), and Mattie Franklin (Celeste O’Connor) — it’s a future that would never come to pass. The film performed so poorly that it reportedly dashed studio hopes for a franchise, and the studio isn’t actively developing other films set in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe after Venom: The Last Dance underperformed and Kraven the Hunter bombed with one of the worst-ever openings for a Marvel comic book adaptation. Palak Patel, Sony’s EVP of Production and Development who oversaw the SSU, recently exited the studio after 10 years, as did Sony Pictures Chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra.
“Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it,” he told The Los Angeles Times before ending his seven-year tenure at Sony Pictures. “It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit.”
“These are not terrible films,” Vinciquerra added. “They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”
Severance season 2 premieres Jan. 17 on Apple TV+.
