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According to Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Haters of Sony’s superhero movies featuring Spider-Man villains received mixed reviews last week. In the middle Kraven the HunterAfter the box office failure, Sony reportedly abandoned plans to create a connected universe of Spidey’s rivals. However, Variety reports that the studio will continue to work in the genre with upcoming releases such as Beyond the Spider-Verse and live action Spider-Man Black series starring Nicolas Cage. While no one can deny the ambitious quality of the Spider-Verse movies, the news that Sony will continue to make superhero movies depresses me because they exemplify everything wrong with the genre.
Sony’s superhero movies are a hit
As Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock noted, Sony’s fatal flaw is that they “tasted success with Poison” and this led them to think they could make “superhero” movies built around Spidey’s colorful rogues gallery. He noted how the studio didn’t realize, “it Poison he could have a franchise while these other characters could not. Keeping Spider-Man out of his own villain movies “was a fatal mistake” because most of those villains aren’t compelling and disastrous in their own right Mrs. Web they proved that Sony is just as inept when it comes to focusing on the superhero rather than the supervillain in their half-baked films.
Who are these heroes?
This brings us to the first obvious example of Sony’s arrogance: they inexplicably assumed that audiences didn’t want any kind of name and brand recognition for these movie protagonists. Miracle he’s been working hard to make Venom a comic book character since the 90s, so there was plenty of material to draw from when creating his solo films. But characters like MorbiusMadame Web and Kraven aren’t nearly as popular or developed, and focusing on them was as crazy as if the MCU released Vulture or Mysterio movies without Spider-Man.
Speaking of MCUcomparing them to Sony reveals how much the latter studio has 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 people who were relatively unknown, incl Tom Holland. Marvel took their time and brought in good actors that would gain an audience, but with movies like Kraven and Mrs. Webit seemed like they were hoping for some famous stunt casting (hey, look, the guy from Kick-Ass he’s an anti-hero now!) would be enough to pique the audience’s interest.
No hookup site
Even worse, Sony never quite figured out how to properly connect their superhero movies. We get gestures towards a shared universe like Vulture on the MCU Morbiusaa No way home Post-credit confirmation from Marvel that the Sony films were in their own multiverse. However, the films never seemed to build or take advantage of their shared universe. This wouldn’t matter if the individual heroes and villains were incredibly engaging, but they just aren’t.
The point of all this is that Sony is committed to making more superhero movies, and there’s basically no sign of learning from the critical and commercial failures. Morbius, Mrs. Weband Kraven the Hunter. The studio seems determined to burn millions and millions of dollars on things that look and feel like a leotard you’d find on the virtual bottom shelf of Tubi. We can only hope they’ve learned at least one lesson for the future: that audiences might actually want Spider-Man in a movie about the Spider-Man universe.
Or, you know, they could just be hoping that things like those tongue-in-cheek “it’s time for Morbin” memes would give these awful movies a cultural footprint they’d never enjoy for their own grim value.
Source: Variety
