Marvel has a hero in Russell Crowe.
The 60-year-old actor defended the superhero media company after Dakota Johnson criticized her flop movie “Madame Web,” saying the project was “made by committees” and had no artistic value.
“You’re telling me you signed up for a Marvel movie, and some f–king universe for cartoon characters … and you didn’t get enough pathos?” Crowe said in a recent interview with GQ UK. “Not quite sure how I can make this better for you. It’s a gigantic machine, and they make movies at a certain size.”
Crowe, who did declare that he didn’t “want to make any comments to what anybody else might have said or what their experience is,” also pointed out that he has experience with superhero films, having starred in DC’s “Man of Steel” and Marvel’s “Thor: Love and Thunder.” He’s also in Sony and Marvel’s upcoming movie “Kraven the Hunter,” which is set in the same universe as “Madame Web.”
“These are jobs,” Crowe said. “You know: here’s your role, play the role. If you’re expecting this to be some kind of life-changing event, I just think you’re here for the wrong reasons.”
However, Crowe did acknowledge that doing superhero movies “can be challenging” at times and that as an actor in those projects, you sometimes “have to convince yourself of a lot more than just the internal machinations of your character.
“But for anything to be … and you can’t make this a direct comment on her because I don’t know her and I don’t know what she went through, and the fact that you can have a s–t experience on a film … Yeah, you can,” he said. “But is that the Marvel process? I’m not sure you can say that. I haven’t had a bad experience.”
The Post has reached out to Johnson’s rep for comment.
Johnson, 34, did her first superhero movie earlier this year to terrible results.
“Madame Web,” which also stars Sydney Sweeney, Emma Roberts and Adam Scott, was universally panned by critics and was a box office failure.
Johnson herself criticized the movie in an interview with Bustle in March.
“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised that this has gone down the way it has,” she said. “But it was definitely an experience for me to make that movie. I had never done anything like that before.”
She also said, “I probably will never do anything like it again because I don’t make sense in that world. And I know that now. But 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?’”
Johnson additionally blamed Sony and Marvel for the way they produced the film.
“It’s so hard to get movies made, and in these big movies that get made … decisions are being made by committees, and art does not do well when it’s made by committee,” she said.
“Films are made by a filmmaker and a team of artists around them. You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not,” she added
In “Madame Web,” Johnson plays clairvoyant paramedic Cassandra “Cassie” Webb/Madame Web, who’s linked to Spider-Man via Benjamin “Ben” Parker (Scott, playing the uncle of Peter Parker, aka Spider-Man).