Sony cut Madame Web's best line from the theatrical release

Madame Web hits theaters soon, and while early Madame Web reviews shredded the superhero movie for its dull plot and flat characters, there’s an even bigger disappointment. Madame Web’s best line is gone.

I should clarify that by "best," I mean "most meme-able."

“He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders right before she died,” Dakota Johnson’s character Cassandra Webb says in the first Madame Web trailer. Sony evidently wanted to make sure everyone knew the clearly villain-coded character was, in fact, a villain and that he had ties to Cassandra’s past and powers. 

It makes more sense than Morbius’ “To bats, it’s lethal; to humans, it’s deadly,” but this is the kind of sentence you’d expect to see in a grammar workbook, an example of how not to write.

The internet quickly turned the line into a meme, and it even got its own copypasta, text copied and pasted as a joke in situations where it may or may not be entirely relevant. The line also set the tone for what everyone expected from Madame Web, with Reddit and film critics alike expressing concerns over the film’s quality if that kind of writing was what we could expect.

As Vulture pointed out, though, Sony condensed the line in the final film. Or maybe it never existed. It wouldn’t be the first time a trailer teased something that didn’t make it to the final. Anyway, Cassandra now says “She was researching spiders.” Tahar Rahim’s Ezekiel was still in the rainforest with Cassandra’s mother, and this meeting took place before she died. Sony just trusts us to piece it together now.