At the end of Sony Picture’s latest Marvel movie “Kraven the Hunter,” the titular hero — played with the most abs possible by Aaron Taylor-Johnson — suffers a bone-chilling hallucination in which he’s surrounded by a horde of spiders. It’s an obvious reference to the character’s greatest enemy in the Marvel comics, Spider-Man.
It’s also almost certain that the closest character (or at least Taylor-Johnson’s version of him) will face off against the web-slinger.
“Kraven” is expected to have one of the lowest opening weekends ever for a Marvel superhero film, making it Sony Pictures’ third unsuccessful attempt to incorporate a secondary Spider-Man character into its film franchise, after 2022. “Morbius” With Jared Leto and “Madame Web” last February with Dakota Johnson. The imminent failure at the box office almost certainly signaled the end of this endeavor for the studio, which one Sony insider attributed to an industry-wide “irrational exuberance around superheroes” that ultimately led to the genre’s general diminishing of the primacy as a film Major. Power at the box office.
But what that doesn’t mean is the end of Sony’s Marvel Universe.
For one thing, technically, there has never been a Sony Marvel Universe, a Sony Spider-Man Universe, or any other official designation similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the newly relaunched DC Universe. Sony has never approached its comic book adaptations with this level of intentional narrative cohesion, as evidenced by the casual, low-key, and clumsy wording the studio uses in its superhero films: Sony’s Universe of Marvel characters.
On the other hand, Sony is still investing heavily in producing films about Spider-Man, the beloved Marvel character who launched the current era of superhero cinema with the 2002 film Spider-Man. It is expected that filming will begin on the fourth part of the Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland in 2025, in partnership with Marvel Studios (more on that later); The animated film “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is in production and will conclude the Oscar-winning trilogy centered on Miles Morales; Sony is producing a live-action “Spider-Man Noir” series starring Nicolas Cage for Amazon Prime Video.
Sony insiders also strongly defend the success of the three “Venom” films starring Tom Hardy, which have grossed more than $1.8 billion worldwide. “Venom: The Last Dance” had the lowest grosser yet ($473 million), especially against the $856 million worldwide of 2018’s “Venom.” But “The Last Dance” cost $120 million, which is a saving. For a superhero movie, it’s improved compared to the 2021 global gross of “Venom: Let There Be Carnage.” So, there’s no financial reason for Sony to stop producing “Venom” movies in Any time soon.
But “Venom” — which was built around a hugely popular character with his own distinct mark on culture — also gave Sony the false impression that audiences would flock to see a movie about any Spider-Man character without Spider-Man in the movie.
“All of these characters are famous because “They ran into Spider-Man,” says Jeff Bock, exhibitor relations analyst. “Unfortunately for Sony, they had tasted success with Venom, and that ruined everything for them, because they thought they could draw out all these characters. I don’t think they realized that Venom could carry a franchise, whereas these other characters… You can’t. The lack of Spider-Man in these films was the fatal flaw.
Sony is not alone in aggressively expanding its superhero portfolio at the end of the 2000s, but it has faced a sharp decline in quality and audience interest in the 2020s. But the studio has run into a unique problem of its own: the unprecedented deal between the studio and Disney’s Marvel Studios to share Spider-Man within the MCU, starting with 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” and 2017’s “Spider-Man.” The guy: Homecoming.” The partnership — in which Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige and former Sony Pictures president Amy Pascal is producing the Tom Holland-led Spidey films for Sony Pictures — has been impressively profitable for Sony, with global revenues exceeding $3.9 billion, but it also kept Dutchman Peter Parker away from any Sony project it’s not Officially part of the MCU.
“The corporate entanglements when studios try to work together are very difficult,” says one senior executive with extensive superhero experience. “Sony doesn’t have the flexibility. They have a cage they have to work in, and they’re only trying to make one good movie at a time.
According to a Sony source, the deal with Disney never prevented Sony from using Spider-Man in its films that did not bear his name; The “Spider-Verse” films’ abundance of Peter Parkers, Gwen Stacy, and other Spider-People certainly proves that. But there was a feeling within the studio that audiences wouldn’t accept Holland’s Spidey suddenly appearing in a live-action film that wasn’t part of the MCU, especially after “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and other Marvel Studios projects. “Loki” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” have set definite boundaries for Marvel’s multiverse.
This appears to have had the biggest impact on “Morbius,” which was originally scheduled to debut in July 2020, long before “No Way Home” and “Doctor Strange 2,” but due to the pandemic ended up opening after them. . The delay forced Sony to reshoot to take into account how Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, who was introduced as part of the MCU in “Homecoming,” could stand in the same room as the living vampire Leto, a character who is not in the MCU – a fun conceit Which didn’t seem like a big deal until the multiverse suddenly made it a big deal.
Dancing around Spider-Man without taking advantage of him also contributed to the feeling that these spin-off films were merely exercises in craven opportunism. “You can sense the sarcasm a mile away,” says a veteran producer. “They grind the product, and it looks like that. There’s no quality control.”
Sony insiders privately admit that “Kraven,” “Madame Web” and “Morbius” are creative and critical failures (even if they also insist that “Morbius,” which grossed $167.4 million worldwide, made money). They say that moving forward the studio will need to be more discerning about which of the studio’s stable of Spider-Man characters should be elevated to their film franchise.
There is a different possibility too. “You can hire a different Spider-Man,” Bock says. “It doesn’t have to be Tom.”