By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Haters of Sony’s superhero movies featuring Spider-Man villains received mixed news this past week. Amid Kraven the Hunter’s box office failure, Sony has reportedly abandoned its plans to create an interconnected universe of Spidey’s rivals. However, Variety reports that the studio will continue to work in this genre with upcoming releases like Beyond the Spider-Verse and the live-action Spider-Man Noir series starring Nicolas Cage. While nobody can deny the ambitious quality of the Spider-Verse films, the news that Sony will continue making superhero movies depresses me because they exemplify everything wrong with the genre.
Sony Superhero Movies Taste Success
As Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock noted, Sony’s fatal flaw is that “they had a taste of success with Venom,” and this led them to think they could just crank out “superhero” movies built around Spidey’s colorful rogues’ gallery. He noted how the studio didn’t realize “that Venom could carry a franchise, whereas these other characters could not.” Keeping Spider-Man out of his own villains’ films “was the fatal flaw” because most of these villains aren’t compelling on their own, and the disastrous Madame Web proved that Sony is equally inept when it comes to focusing on a superhero rather than a supervillain for their underbaked movies.
Who Are These Heroes?
That brings us to the first obvious example of Sony’s hubris: they inexplicably assumed that audiences didn’t want any kind of name-brand recognition for these cinematic protagonists. Marvel has been working hard to make Venom a colo comics character since the ‘90s, and accordingly, there was plenty of material to draw from when creating his solo films. But characters like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven aren’t nearly as popular or developed, and focusing on them was just as crazy as if the MCU had released Vulture or Mysterio films without Spider-Man.
Speaking of the MCU, comparing them to Sony reveals just how much the latter studio put the cart before the horse with their superhero movies. While Marvel has cast some big names before, many of fans’ favorite characters are played by people who were relatively unknown, including Tom Holland. Marvel took the time to bring in good actors who would win audiences over, but with movies like Kraven and Madame Web, they seemed to hope some familiar stunt casting (hey, look, the guy from Kick-Ass is an antihero now!) would be enough to stoke audience interest.
No Connecting Web
Making matters worse is that Sony never quite figured out how to properly connect its superhero movies. We get gestures toward a shared universe like the MCU’s Vulture in Morbius, and a No Way Home post-credits confirmation from Marvel that Sony’s movies were in their own multiverse. But the movies never seemed to be building to anything nor taking advantage of their shared universe. That wouldn’t matter if the individual heroes and villains were incredibly compelling, but that simply isn’t the case.
The punchline to all of this is that Sony is committed to making more superhero movies, and there are basically no signs that they have learned from the critical and commercial failures of Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter. The studio seems committed to burning millions upon millions of dollars on stuff that looks and feels like the dreck that you’d find on the virtual bottom shelf of Tubi. We can only hope they’ve internalized at least one lesson going forward: that audiences might actually want Spider-Man in a Spider-Man universe film.
Or, you know, they could just hope things like those ironic “it’s Morbin’ time” memes can give these awful films the cultural footprint they would never enjoy on their own dismal merits.
Source: Variety
