By Chris Snellgrove | Published
Haters of Sony's superhero movies featuring Spider-Man villains got mixed news this past week. In the middle Kraven the HunterA box office failure, Sony has reportedly abandoned its plans to make a connected universe of Spidey rivals. However, Variety reports that the studio will continue to work on the genre with future releases like this one Beyond the Spider-Verse and live action Spider-Man Noir series starring Nicolas Cage. While no one can deny the outstanding quality of the Spider-Verse films, the news that Sony will continue to make superhero movies depresses me because it shows everything that is wrong with the genre.
Sony Superhero Movies Taste Success
As Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock noted, Sony's fatal mistake was “having a taste for success Poison,” and this led them to think they could just release “superhero” movies built around Spidey's colorful rogues gallery. He mentioned how the studio didn't realize “that Venom can carry the franchise, and these other characters can't.” Keeping Spider-Man out of his movies was a “fatal mistake” because most of these villains are not compelling in their own right, and are disastrous. Madame Web proved that Sony is equally incompetent when it comes to focusing on the superhero instead of the supervillain in their raw movies.
Who Are These Heroes?
That brings us to the first obvious example of Sony's hubris: they vaguely assumed that audiences didn't want any kind of name recognition for these cinematic characters. Marvel has been working hard to make Venom a comic character since the '90s, and as a result, there was a lot of material to draw from when creating his own films. But characters like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven weren't nearly as popular or developed, and the focus on them was as crazy as if the MCU had released Vulture or Mysterio movies without Spider-Man.
Speaking of the MCU, comparing it to Sony reveals how much the latter studio has put the cart before the horse with their superhero movies. While Marvel has cast big names before, many of the fan-favorite characters are played by unknowns, including Tom Holland. Marvel took some time to bring in good characters that would win over audiences, but with movies like Kraven and Madame Web, they seem to be hoping for more mainstream acting (hey, look, the guy from Go die he's an antihero now!) will be enough to pique the audience's interest.
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What makes matters worse is that Sony has never figured out how to properly connect their superhero movies. We get a touch of the shared universe as the MCU's Vulture in Morbiusand a No Way Home a post-credits confirmation from Marvel that Sony's movies were their own variety. But the movies never seem to build on anything or use a shared universe. That wouldn't matter if the heroes and villains were incredibly compelling, but they aren't.
The point of all this is that Sony is committed to making more superhero films, and there are no signs that they have learned from the critical and commercial failures of. Morbius, Madame Webagain Kraven the Hunter. The studio seems committed to burning millions upon millions of dollars on stuff that looks and sounds like the dreck you'd find on the bottom shelf of Tubi. We can only hope they internalized at least one lesson going forward: that audiences might want Spider-Man in a Spider-Man movie universe.
Or, you know, they might hope that things like the “it's Morbin's time” funnies would give these bad movies a cultural foothold they'll never enjoy for their own damn good.
Source: Variety
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