Warning: This post contains spoilers for Madame Web.
Moviegoers are conditioned to wait until the very end of a superhero movie for a post-credits scene. Surely, you’d be forgiven for thinking, Madame Web will end with a teaser that will have big implications for Sony’s somewhat messy Spider-Man cinematic universe. The movie is even set in the past, in 2003, and there’s a surprising connection to Peter Parker and some of the most important Spidey characters. There must be some big flash forward or continuity-altering reveal that ties everything together, right?
Well, you don’t need to be able to see the future, like Madame Web’s titular character. Here’s how the movie ends, and whether or not you should stick around.
Read more: Everything You Need to Know About Madame Web
Madame Web does not have a post-credits scene
Past movies in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, like Morbius and Venom, have had post-credit scenes. Almost every movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe ends with a post-credits scene or two, whether they’re a silly winking end note or a future supervillain teeing up their appearance in the next movie. Madame Web has neither. There is no mid-credits sequence nor is there a post-credits sequence at the end of this movie. You can leave and use the bathroom the second the action ends. Staying until the very end will get you nothing more than the comforting knowledge that no animals were harmed during the making of this film.
However, even though there is no post-credits scene teasing the future adventures of Madame Web or a time-jump from the 2003 setting to the present day that formally introduces Spider-Man to this fiction, Madame Web does end with a lot of open-ended setup for possible sequels—though based on the reviews this film has been getting, that seems unlikely.
How does Madame Web end?
Madame Web is about a young woman named Cassie Webb (Dakota Johnson), who discovers she has the power to see into the future thanks to an incident involving a mystical spider that bit her mother when she was pregnant (while she was researching spiders in the Amazon before she died). Tahar Rahim plays Ezekiel Sims, the man responsible for Cassie’s mom’s death who has spider powers of his own. He spends the movie trying to murder three women (played by Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O'Connor, and Isabela Merced) because he has a vision that the three of them will gain superpowers and kill him in the future. Cassie begrudgingly takes it upon herself to try to save these three teenagers’ lives.
Meanwhile, Cassie’s friend, a fellow paramedic played by Adam Scott, is none other than Ben Parker, Spider-Man’s iconic uncle. His sister Mary (Emma Roberts) is pregnant with Peter Parker.
Toward the end of the movie, Cassie has begun to unlock the full potential of her powers by traveling to the Peruvian rainforest where she was born. She learns that her mother traveled to the Amazon despite being heavily pregnant because she hoped she could find the fabled spider and that it would lead to a medical breakthrough that could cure Cassie of myasthenia gravis, a disease that she had been diagnosed with while in the womb. In the comics, Madame Web is actually an elderly woman who is blind and uses a wheelchair because she has this same condition. In the movie, the spider bit Cassie’s mom right before she was born, cured her of the disease, and gave her the power of foresight with its venom.
At first, it seems like the mention of the disease is a little Easter egg that squares the comic version of the character with the fact that 34-year-old Dakota Johnson has been running around and using her eyesight for an hour and a half. But then, during the explosive climax when Johnson manages to defeat Ezekiel and save the three girls, she’s blinded and seemingly paralyzed by a stray fireworks rocket that hits her as she’s sinking into the East River.
The last scene of the movie takes place in Cassie’s apartment, where she’s living with the three girls she saved. Cassie seems unbothered by her disability. Thanks to her superpowers, she can see the future well enough that her lack of actual sight doesn’t matter. The three girls, Julia Cornwall, Mattie Franklin, and Anya Corazon (played by Sweeney, O’Connor, and Merced, respectively), end the movie without having gained the superpowers that turn them into Spider-Women as foreseen in Ezekiel’s vision. That’s probably for the best, as all three have complicated, convoluted backstories in the comics. It’s also not clear, necessarily, that any of them have what it takes to properly headline a movie, as they’re supporting characters in a movie about a supporting Spider-Man characters—a copy of a copy.
However, Cassie’s prophetic visions tease a future where all three have obtained their superpowers and are fighting crime in New York City together, aided by Cassie herself, thanks to some sort of astral projection. It’s implied that this is the future that a sequel could cover (should Sony somehow manage to lure a now-major star like Sydney Sweeney back to reprise her role as what basically amounts to a supporting character). Madame Web is the title character’s origin story, but it’s a prologue to the Spider-Women’s origin stories.
By the time the movie ends, Mary Parker has also given birth to baby Peter Parker. Since Madame Web takes place in 2003, Peter would presumably be actively fighting crime as a now-grown-up Spider-Man in any present-day sequels. If the intention was for Madame Web to neatly fit in as a prequel to any established film version of Spider-Man, it’s a little messy but conceivable.
In a sense, despite not having a proper post-credits scene teasing future developments or installments, Madame Web’s actual ending is teeing up a lot of potential future action. At this point, though, only Madame Web herself (and Sony’s accounting department) know whether this story will continue on the big screen.
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