Towards the end of Sony Pictures’ latest Marvel movie, Kraven the Hunter, the titular antihero, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson with maximum abdominal muscles, finds himself surrounded by a swarm of spiders in a chilling scene. experience such hallucinations. This is a clear allusion to the Marvel Comics character’s greatest nemesis, Spider-Man.
Also, this is almost certainly the closest the character (or at least Taylor-Johnson’s version of him) will come to confronting the web-slinger.
Kraven is on track to be the lowest-grossing weekend box office ever for a Marvel superhero movie, and the latest in Sony Pictures’ failed attempt to spin off a secondary Spider-Man character into its own movie franchise. This will be the third work following the release in 2022. “Morbius” with Jared Leto and “Madame Web” with Dakota Johnson last February. The impending box office failure almost certainly means the end of this effort at the studio, with knowledgeable insiders at Sony saying that the industry-wide “irrational enthusiasm for superheroes” will ultimately We speculated that this was leading to an overall decline in its dominance as a mainstay of the genre. Power at the box office.
But that doesn’t mean the end of Sony’s Marvel Universe.
First, strictly speaking, the Sony Marvel Universe, Sony Spider-Man Universe, or any other official name similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the newly restarted DC Universe never actually existed. Sony has never had that level of intentional narrative coherence, as exemplified by the studio’s casual, lowercase, rhetorically clunky phrasing in its superhero films, namely Sony’s world of Marvel characters. I had never worked on a comic book movie before.
For another, Sony remains deeply invested in making movies about Spider-Man, the popular Marvel character who ushered in the current era of superhero movies with 2002’s “Spider-Man.” The fourth Spider-Man movie, starring Tom Holland, is scheduled to begin filming in 2025 in partnership with Marvel Studios (more details below). The animated Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse is currently in production and will be the final installment of the Oscar-winning trilogy that focuses on Miles Morales. Sony is producing a live-action Spider-Man Noir series starring Nicolas Cage for Amazon Prime Video.
Sony insiders have also fiercely defended the success of the three Venom movies starring Tom Hardy, which have grossed more than $1.8 billion worldwide. The latest film, Venom: The Last Dance, is the lowest-grossing film in the series’ history ($473 million), especially compared to 2018’s Venom, which grossed $856 million worldwide. This is remarkable. However, The Last Dance cost $120 million to make, a low budget for a superhero movie, and it surpassed the international box office gross of 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage. So there’s really no economic reason for Sony to stop making a Venom movie anytime soon.
But Venom, built around a widely popular character who left his own mark on culture, gave Sony the false impression that audiences would flock to see a movie with the Spider-Man character that didn’t feature Spider-Man. Gave.
“Both of these characters are famous because they faced off against Spider-Man,” said exhibitor relations analyst Jeff Bock. “Unfortunately for Sony, they had a taste of success with ‘Venom,’ but it ruined everything because they thought they could spin off all these characters. ”I don’t think they understood that Venom could have a franchise and other characters couldn’t. Spider-Man’s absence from these films was a fatal flaw. ”
Sony wasn’t the only company to aggressively expand its superhero portfolio in the late 2010s. However, the 2020s saw it weather a sharp decline in both quality and audience interest. But the studio was caught in a unique Catch-22 of its own making. Captain America: Civil War in 2016 and Spider-Man: Return in 2017. The partnership, in which Marvel Studios chief executive Kevin Feige and former Sony Pictures chief executive Amy Pascal will produce the Tom Holland-led Spider-Man movie for Sony Pictures, is a staggering profit for Sony. , and worldwide box office revenue exceeded $3.9 billion. But it also isolated Holland’s Peter Parker from Sony projects that are not officially part of the MCU.
“The corporate entanglement when studios are trying to work together is really difficult,” said one top executive with extensive experience in the superhero field. “Sony has no flexibility. They have a cage that they have to work in, and they’re just trying to make one good movie at a time.”
According to one Sony official, the deal with Disney did not prevent Sony from using Spider-Man in movies that do not bear the Spider-Man name. This is evidenced by Peter Parker, Gwen Stacy, and various other Spider-Men from the Spider-Verse movies. But there are rumors within the studio that audiences won’t accept Holland’s Spidey suddenly appearing in a live-action film that isn’t part of the MCU, especially after Spider-Man: No Way Home and other Marvel Studios projects. There was a great atmosphere. “Loki” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” established definitive boundaries for Marvel’s multiverse.
This seems to have had the biggest impact on Morbius, which was originally scheduled for release in July 2020, long before No Way Home and Doctor Strange 2, but was postponed due to the pandemic. came later. The delay means Sony is considering the possibility that Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, who appeared as part of the MCU in Homecoming, could end up in the same room as Leto’s titular living vampire, a character who doesn’t appear in the MCU. The film was forced to be reshot. A fun conceit that didn’t seem like a big deal until the multiverse suddenly became one.
Dancing around Spider-Man without being able to capitalize on him also contributed to the feeling that these spin-off movies were just, well, an exercise in demented opportunism. “The irony can be felt a mile away,” says the veteran producer. “They hone their product to the hilt and feel that way. There’s no quality control.”
Sony insiders have privately acknowledged that “Kraven,” “Madame Web,” and “Morbius” were creative and critical duds (even though “Kraven,” “Madame Web,” and “Morbius,” which made $167.4 million worldwide, Morbius” actually claims to have made a profit). Going forward, they say, the studio will have to be more careful about which characters from its stable of Spider-Man characters it promotes into its own film series.
There is another possibility. “We could hire another Spider-Man,” Bock says. “It doesn’t have to be Tom.”
