By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Haters of Sony superhero movies featuring Spider-Man villains got mixed news last week. Amid Kraven the hunterAfter the box office failure, Sony would have abandoned its plans to create an interconnected universe of Spidey’s rivals. However, Variety reports that the studio will continue working in this genre with upcoming releases such as Beyond the Spider-Verse and live action Black Spider-Man Series starring Nicolas Cage. While no one can deny the ambitious quality of the Spider-Verse movies, the news that Sony will continue making superhero movies depresses me because they exemplify everything wrong with the genre.
Sony’s superhero movies know success
As Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock noted, Sony’s fatal flaw is that they “tasted success with Poison”, and this led them to think that they could produce “superhero” movies based on Spidey’s colorful rogues gallery. He noted that the study did not realize “that Poison “I could carry a franchise, while these other characters couldn’t.” Keeping Spider-Man out of his own villains’ movies “was the fatal mistake” because most of these villains aren’t compelling on their own, and the disastrous lady web proved that Sony is equally inept when it comes to focusing on a superhero instead of a supervillain for its undercooked films.
Who are these heroes?
That brings us to the first obvious example of Sony’s arrogance: they inexplicably assumed that audiences didn’t want any kind of brand recognition for these movie leads. Wonder He’s been working hard to make Venom a comic book character since the ’90s, and consequently, there was plenty of material to draw from when creating his solo films. But characters like morbiumMadame Web and Kraven aren’t as popular or as developed, and focusing on them was as crazy as if the MCU had released Vulture or Mysterio movies without Spider-Man.
Speaking of the MCUComparing them to Sony reveals how much the latter studio put the cart before the horse with its superhero movies. While Marvel has cast some big names before, many fan-favorite characters are played by relative unknowns, including Tom Holland. Marvel took the time to incorporate good actors who would win over audiences, but with films like Kraven and lady webThey seemed to be expecting some familiar stunt casting (hey, look, the guy from kick ass (now he’s an antihero!) would be enough to pique the audience’s interest.
No web connection
To make matters worse, Sony never figured out how to properly connect their superhero movies. We get gestures toward a shared universe like the MCU’s Vulture in morbiumand a No way home Marvel’s post-credits confirmation that Sony’s films were in their own multiverse. But the films never seemed to be building anything or taking advantage of their shared universe. That wouldn’t matter if the individual heroes and villains were incredibly compelling, but that’s simply not the case.
The bottom line in all of this is that Sony is committed to making more superhero movies, and there’s basically no sign that they’ve learned from the critical and commercial failures of morbium, lady weband Kraven the hunter. The studio seems committed to spending millions and millions of dollars on things that look and feel like the junk you’d find on Tubi’s virtual bottom shelf. We can only hope they’ve internalized at least one lesson going forward: that audiences really want Spider-Man in a Spider-Man universe movie.
Or, you know, they could just hope that things like those tongue-in-cheek “it’s Morbin time” memes can give these horrible movies the cultural imprint they’d never enjoy on their own depressing merits.
Fountain: Variety
