The lights were on, but nobody came. At Brazil’s prestigious Comic Con Experience (CCXP) on Sunday, Sony Pictures’ surprise panel for “Kraven the Hunter” — the studio’s latest non-Spider-Man Marvel movie — played to rows of empty seats, according to an individual in attendance. There were no stars, and not that many fans. Just silence where superhero hype should have been.
The half-empty panel presentation of a $110 million budgeted antihero movie at one of the world’s largest pop culture events reflected the Sony Marvel franchise’s diminishing profile outside the mainline “Spider-Man” movies starring Tom Holland. While “Venom: The Last Dance” launched on more than 4,000 movie screens in October, “Kraven the Hunter” will debut this Friday in just 3,000 — a stark 25% reduction that signals waning confidence in Sony’s failed Marvel experiment.
The latest setback follows a string of disappointments for Sony as it has sought to exploit its rights hold on most of the characters in Marvel’s “Spider-Man” comics, from the historic second-week collapse of “Morbius” in 2022 to the disastrous $52 million worldwide opening of “Madame Web” earlier this year.
The studio’s desire to capitalize on the superhero boom led to a series of tonal mismatches that left audiences confused rather than intrigued. “Venom” succeeded largely on Tom Hardy’s chaotic charm, but attempts to replicate that formula with “Morbius” and “Madame Web” resulted in films that seemed uncertain whether they were horror, action or comedy.
The identity crisis extended beyond individual films to the universe as a whole, which never established a consistent style or vision in the way Marvel Studios had with the MCU.
“Anytime you try to spin off a character, you’re hoping to grab some of that magic created by the halo effect that the branding of ‘Spider-Man’ can bring to the table, but it’s not always a slam dunk,” Paul Dergarabedian, senior media analyst at Comscore told the Wrap. “It’s easier said than done.” Although Dergarabedian noted that “Kraven” could find a place in the December marketplace as R-rated counterprogramming to family friendly are.
Sony declined to comment for this story.
The apparent end of Sony’s Marvel spinoff franchise represents one of Hollywood’s most ambitious – and costly – attempts to build a shared cinematic universe without its central character. While Spider-Man himself swings successfully through Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe thanks to a landmark shared deal struck in 2015 with Marvel Studios, Sony’s solo efforts to mine Spidey’s rogues gallery have proved to be a costly catastrophe: The studio has burned through more than $465 million in production costs while audience interest plummeted with each release.
“The biggest issue with the Sony Spider-Man spinoffs seems to be the lack of quality control. The movies just aren’t good,” a Sony insider told The Wrap. “Sometimes that lack of quality meets a movie no one asked for, which was the case with ‘Madame Web,’ and that is a no-win scenario. It may be time for Sony to start cultivating different IP to launch new franchises.”
From superhero master to eroding box office returns
The financial trajectory of Sony’s Marvel universe tells its own stark story. While 2018’s “Venom” grossed $856 million worldwide and its sequel managed to cross $500 million despite pandemic constraints, each subsequent release showed diminishing returns.
The Jared Leto-fronted “Morbius” limped to $167 million globally, with a historic 74% second-weekend box office drop that became a social media punchline. While “Venom: The Last Dance” — the third and likely final film in the “Venom” franchise — demonstrated the enduring appeal of Hardy’s portrayal with a $472 million worldwide gross as of Monday, the Dakota Johnson-led “Madame Web” marked a new low for the franchise. Its $52 million worldwide opening earlier this year represented one of the weakest debuts for a major superhero film in recent memory, compounded by a wave of memes poking fun at the female-centric film’s quality.
The steady erosion of box office returns — from nearly $900 million to less than $500 million for the flagship “Venom” series alone — painted a clear picture for Sony executives: Audiences are simply not having it.
The irony of Sony’s current predicament lies in its previous mastery of the superhero genre. Before the arrival of the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2007, Sam Raimi’s original “Spider-Man” trilogy with Tobey Maguire helped establish the modern superhero blockbuster — 2004’s “Spider-Man 2” is still considered among the genre’s finest achievements.
Even Andrew Garfield’s shortened “Amazing Spider-Man” tenure demonstrated the studio’s ability to reimagine the character for new audiences. This track record makes the current string of critically panned spinoffs all the more striking. It’s a cautionary tale about mistaking audience love for a character as guaranteed interest in their wider world.
The seeds of Sony’s ill-fated spinoff universe were planted in the aftermath of 2014’s “The Amazing Spider-Man 2.” When that film’s underperformance derailed plans for a “Sinister Six” movie and other Spider-Man-centric spinoffs, Sony struck a deal with Disney to integrate Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe while Marvel Studios took creative lead on the main “Spider-Man” movies, which Sony would continue to produce and distribute. The result is a beloved Spider-Man in Holland and a trilogy of films that grossed nearly $4 billion.
Yet rather than focusing solely on that partnership, in a baffling move Sony remained determined to also exploit their Marvel character rights independently.
The surprise success of 2018’s “Venom” — which grossed $856 million globally despite poor reviews — proved intoxicating to studio executives, convincing them they could build a parallel universe of “Spider-Man” villains without Spider-Man himself. One of the key architects of Sony’s Marvel spinoff strategy, Sanford Panitch, publicly defended the projects multiple times.
But the one-off “Venom” success story proved a template for disaster, as Sony rushed to green light additional spinoffs without the coherent creative vision that made their earlier Spider-Man films, and even “Venom,” connect with audiences.
The future is all about Spidey
For Sony, the future appears to lie in projects more directly connected to Spider-Man himself. “They’ve developed what they want to develop for now,” a top talent agent told TheWrap. “It’s really about the next ‘Spider-Man’ film.”
According to a second Sony insider, the studio is now focusing its efforts on Holland’s highly anticipated fourth “Spider-Man” film, the next installment in the acclaimed “Spider-Verse” animated film series with “Beyond the Spider-Verse” and a “Spider-Noir” television series featuring Nicolas Cage — projects that lean into, rather than away from, the web-slinger’s central appeal.
While industry conversations about “superhero fatigue” have intensified in recent years, much of that discourse has centered specifically on Sony’s Marvel offerings. The critical and commercial failures of “Morbius” and “Madame Web” seemed less indicative of audience exhaustion with the genre itself than an outright rejection of Sony’s poorly executed superhero movies.
As successful releases from other studios like “The Batman” and “Deadpool and Wolverine” demonstrated, audiences remained willing to turn out for well-crafted superhero films — they had simply become more discriminating about quality.
The fundamental flaw in Sony’s approach lay in its attempt to build a universe around Spider-Man’s rogues gallery while dancing around the web-slinger himself. The studio found itself in the peculiar position of owning rights to hundreds of characters whose stories traditionally revolve around their relationships with a hero who remained conspicuously absent from their narratives.
That creative constraint forced writers into increasingly awkward narrative situations, perhaps most evident in the much-derided post-credit scenes in “Morbius” that tried to tie the movie into Michael Keaton’s villainous Vulture from “Spider-Man: Homecoming.” It never paid off.
Not that Sony didn’t try to bring that Spider-Man shine to its films. In 2019, after the success of the second Holland Spider-Man film “Far From Home,” talks between Sony and Marvel Studios to continue the partnership fell apart. Sony announced it would instead make “Spider-Man 3” on its own without Marvel or Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige’s involvement.
The outcry was so intense — and the notion of a Marvel Studios-less “Spider-Man” movie so distasteful — that Holland himself got involved. He called Disney CEO Bob Iger personally to bring both sides back together. It worked, and “Spider-Man: No Way Home” grossed nearly $2 billion.
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