Evil Spider-Man Ezekiel Sims in Madame Web is a pretty bland villain, even with Tahar Rahim’s charm. But how’d he get rich after studying spiders in the Amazon?
Sony’s baffling Spider-Man Universe movie Madame Web leaves a lot of questions behind, some of them entirely practical (are we ever going to see all these young heroes actually gain their powers and… become heroes?) and some of them much more the kind of fandom debate-squad fodder beloved on Reddit. (Will there ever be a Spider-Man in this particular wing of the multiverse, or will Cassandra save Adam Scott’s Uncle Ben from being senselessly murdered, since he’s basically family?)
You could spend all day talking about the weird implications Cassandra’s future-vision has for the SSU, or discussing whether it’s the first story in history where someone acting to avert a prophecy doesn’t just enable that prophecy instead. But those aren’t the questions that bothered me throughout the movie. I was stuck on a more central plot point. How the hell did Madame Web’s villain become rich?
[Ed. note: Spoilers ahead for Madame Web’s plot setup.]
Madame Web’s flashback prologue finds the heroine’s mom, Constance (Kerry Bishé), where we expect her to be: researching spiders in the Amazon before she died. We see her die, in fact, after being shot by the villain, Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), who wants to steal the extremely rare spider she’s just discovered. As he tells her immediately after his sudden but inevitable betrayal, in a wee little villain speech that encapsulates virtually everything we get to know about the man, he has to steal it because it’s his only road out of poverty. He didn’t grow up with the same kinds of choices she did, he tells her self-righteously.
The next time we see Ezekiel, he’s living in a vast NYC penthouse, all floor-to-ceiling glass and startling city views. He’s wearing expensive suits and seducing beautiful women at the opera. His stolen spider lives in an elaborate custom jungle habitat that’s lusher than half the apartments in Manhattan. He’s clearly coded as the kind of smug, evil millionaire the movies love to hate. But how did he turn spider-possession into a cash concern?
I know, to a lot of people, this is going to seem like a tiny, irrelevant detail. It’s hardly the biggest hole in a movie that’s mostly nonsense, sequel teases, and random but prominent 2003 references, like the building-sized mural proclaiming the release of Beyoncé’s Dangerously in Love. But it’s a more telling detail than it appears to be, because it’s so absolutely basic to the story, and it’s a question the screenwriters can’t be bothered to answer.
