In the first moments of her opening monologue for “Saturday Night Live” on March 2, Sweeney seemingly acknowledged a poor start at the box office and critical reviews of the film, saying: “You might have seen me in ‘Anyone but You’ or ‘Euphoria.’ You definitely did not see me in ‘Madame Web.’” The movie was also joked about at the Oscars.

It started when the trailer for the film spurred memes. Now, the web of media attention sparked by negative reviews — The New York Times used adjectives like“absurd” and “uninspired,” and Vulture called it“bad in a boring way”— feels as if it’s still spinning.

And yet some see in “Madame Web” future cult-classic potential.

“I think the movie will definitely age really well,” O’Connor said. “The thing that means the most to me is the fact that us three as young women, all from different backgrounds, get to be superheroes. And I hope that that just opens doors for other young women and other people of color to play whatever roles they want to play.”

A report released by the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative last month analyzed 1,700 movies from 2007 to 2023. It found that across last year’s 100 top-grossing theatrically-released films in North America, only 30 featured girls or women as leads or co-leads — the smallest number since 2014. In 2023, “The Flash”’s Ezra Miller was the only nonbinary actor with a leading role, according to the report, which also identified 37 films featuring leads or co-leads from “underrepresented” racial and ethnic groups, an increase over the previous year, but only for men of color.

In “Ghostbusters: Frozen Empire,” O’Connor will join Mckenna Grace, Bill Murray, Finn Wolfhard, Paul Rudd and others as Lucky Domingo, a character they also portrayed in “Ghostbusters: Afterlife.” That film performed well at the box office and received some enthusiastic reviews.

This time around, Lucky is older and living in New York. “She’s also more confident in her ghostbusting skills as well,” O’Connor said.

For O’Connor, who co-founded a production company called Pedestal in 2020, growing their talent includes aspiring to make queer and Black films as a producer.

“I want to continue to make science fiction movies that can serve as a blueprint or an example of what an alternate reality would look like, where women are in power, where Black people are in power, where queer people are in power,” they said.

“And so not just replicating the same systems that exist in our day-to-day life in films, but using film as a place to play with our imagination, for the purpose of expanding the collective’s imagination and moving towards a more free future.”

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