Warning: This piece contains spoilers for Venom: The Last Dance and Kraven the Hunter.
In news sure not to excite anyone in particular, Kraven the Hunter is now in theaters. The latest and most likely last live-action spin-off flick for Sony’s unfortunate cinematic universe is limping towards a humiliating opening weekend with scathing reviews (including IGN’s), marking an ignominious end for what’s been one of the worst years ever for the superhero genre. While no major superhero franchise is at its best right now, with the MCU struggling to get back to the heights of the Infinity Saga and Warner Bros. betting big on James Gunn’s upcoming Superman reboot to get DC back on track, none have been as consistently lackluster as the Sony Spider-Man Universe (SSU). Or is it the Sony Universe of Marvel Characters (SUMC)?
Whatever this franchise was supposed to be called, it’s all but certainly over. The Wrap recently reported that Sony Pictures is seeking to shutter this flailing enterprise after Kraven the Hunter so they can put all their focus on the upcoming Spider-Man 4 and Beyond the Spider-Verse. Good on them for cutting their losses and not subjecting us to any more of this nonsense, but the real question is: How did anyone think this was going to turn out differently? None of these movies were particularly good (sorry, Venom fans) and they all starred characters who are defined by their relationships to Spider-Man, a character they weren’t allowed to meet. This series was always going to fail, even if someone managed to wrangle a worthwhile movie out of the situation. Let’s take a look at why Sony’s Marvel Universe was doomed before it even started.
Spider-Man: Civil War
The Sony Universe has always been a strange beast because of the bizarre rights situation it exists in. Sony Pictures holds the film rights to the Spider-Man franchise, but after the critical and financial disappointment of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 in 2014, Sony decided to share Spider-Man with Marvel Studios and allow Peter Parker to swing into the MCU, where he’s since been played by Tom Holland. But Sony had already started development on multiple spin-off projects during the TASM days, such as Venom and Sinister Six films. Sony clearly wanted to exploit more of the Marvel characters they had access to, but the centerpiece of the franchise, Spider-Man, was now tangled up in the web of what is technically their competitor.
The solo Spider-Man films that came after were indicative of the passive-aggressive agreement that Disney and Sony struck. Homecoming and Far From Home were drowning in references to the wider MCU, ensuring that it would be difficult for Sony to just “pull out” of the arrangement without upsetting fans and shareholders who would question why Holland’s now very popular version of the character was no longer in the same world as his Avengers pals, while No Way Home used brute force to get versions of characters from Sony’s non-MCU franchises into “legitimacy” with the power of the multiverse. But none of that changes that Sony’s connection to the wider Marvel brand was remarkably one-sided, something that even general audiences were capable of cluing in to.
The “in association with Marvel” logo that Sony was forced to use and the clear indication that they weren’t allowed to feature Spider-Man in their spin-off films created an omnipresent feeling of Sony’s films being a B-side to the MCU. Regardless of how many times Tom Hardy or others teased Venom meeting Spider-Man, the entire Venom trilogy came and went without the two characters ever crossing paths. Same with Morbius, Madame Web, and now Kraven, with the closest thing to a proper Peter Parker appearance outside of Let There Be Carnage’s post-credits scene being him being born in Madame Web. It’s laughable that a cinematic universe filled with Spider-Man characters doesn’t actually have Spider-Man in it, but that fact ruined the series in more ways than one.
The Unsinister Six
We say this with nothing but love for superhero fiction, but it tends to be fairly conventional. With respect to exceptions like Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns or X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, most superhero stories follow a fairly standard formula and find their own take in the details, not the blueprint. Therefore, superhero films, especially ones depicting origin stories, follow a similar mold where the protagonist undergoes a formative arc that parallels them coming to terms with their powers and accepting their role as a superhero. However, besides Madame Web, Sony has exclusively used supervillains as the lead characters in their films, meaning that they have to turn these comic book antagonists into heroic figures almost by necessity, especially since their actual enemy, Spider-Man, is both a good guy and not around.
Venom started his comic book career as a villain who wanted nothing more than to cave in Spider-Man’s skull, and although he later adopted the role of Lethal Protector and became more of an antihero, his choice to move away from his villainous past only makes sense within the context of actually having one. Kraven and Morbius also started off as Spider-Man enemies, and although the latter has the “tragic monster” angle going on, he has always had a dark side even when he’s worked on the side of the good. But these movies flatten any potential nuance by having their leads be unambiguous hero figures, which only begs the question of why they would ever even hypothetically have interest in fighting Spider-Man down the line.
It is, of course, possible that filmmakers with a strong vision and respect for the source material could have figured out a way to make properly villainous characters into big movie leads, but Sony apparently had no interest in allowing that. All of these movies are corporate hackjobs regardless of the talents of anyone involved, conjured into being by executives and accountants desperate to compete in the superhero big leagues. Yet people who had any love for these characters would recognize that making them utterly antithetical to their comic book counterparts was doing them a disservice, but that’s exactly what Sony did at every turn. It’s beyond depressing to see the love and care for the superhero genre and comic book medium in their animated Spider-Verse features be so absent in their live-action entries. But perhaps that was inevitable when the desire to constantly expand Sony’s superhero world was circumvented by the logistics of only owning one superhero franchise.
A One-Track Universe
Here’s the thing with trying to build a cinematic universe: You actually need more than one franchise in order to do it. An under-discussed reason why the MCU clicked the way it did is because Marvel Studios had access to several different franchises that could have existed independently of each other if they needed to, and only gained extra value when put in the same world. Sony’s problem is that they only had one franchise, that being Spider-Man. Even without Peter Parker in them, Venom, Morbius, Madame Web and Kraven are still all Spider-Man movies because they are attached to his world by default. You can’t have one without the other, meaning that trying to force the issue and make movies about these characters without Spider-Man is only going to result in a series that cannibalizes itself to death.
The Venom movies all feature a tiny cast and symbiote or symbiote-adjacent antagonists. Madame Web is a prequel about a group of characters who will eventually become Spider-Women, but not in the movie itself. Kraven has to battle (and kill!) the Rhino, depriving Spider-Man of another hypothetical antagonist down the line. All of these films feel empty because none of these characters were designed to be leads. They are supporting characters who are part of a larger world centered around a figure who can actually shoulder that burden. Trying to build a universe out of appetizers without ever getting to the main course was only ever going to leave the audience starving.
The lesson that Sony Pictures never learned is that carving up pieces of your franchise and then trying to duct tape them back together doesn’t actually make your franchise any bigger. But they couldn’t help but try to get in on that blockbuster pie all the same, even if it meant fronting hysterical ideas like having the MCU’s Vulture warp into the post-credits scene of Morbius, or of teasing Knull as a major threat down the line right after killing Venom, meaning he would presumably be stuck battling a ramshackle group of second stringers. Hell, even the ideas that didn’t wind up happening, such as teaming up Black Cat and Silver Sable, two characters who have nothing to do with each other besides both being women in Spider-Man’s world, or of making a Sinister Six movie in a universe where Spider-Man presumably can’t appear when that group exists for the sole reason of fighting Spider-Man, are exactly the sort of cheese-brained absurdity that we as a society should never have entertained. Sure, Sony’s Marvel Universe may have failed, but the real travesty is that it was ever allowed to try.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Bluesky.
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