‘Kraven’ is expected to have one of the lowest opening weekends ever for a Marvel superhero movie and will be Sony Pictures‘ third attempt to incorporate a secondary Spider-Man character into its film franchise, following 2022’s ‘Morbius’ with Jared Leto and last February’s ‘Madame Web’ with Dakota Johnson.
One knowledgeable insider at Sony attributed this to an industry-wide “irrational exuberance about superheroes” that has ultimately led to the overall diminishment of the genre’s primacy as the leading force at the box office.
However, that doesn’t mean the end of Sony’s Marvel Universe. Sony continues to invest heavily in making movies about ‘Spider-Man,’ the Marvel character made popular with 2002’s ‘Spider-Man.2 The fourth ‘Spider-Man’ movie starring Tom Holland is expected to start shooting in 2025 in partnership with Marvel Studios. ‘Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse’ is in production and will complete the Oscar-winning trilogy centered on Miles Morales. Additionally, Sony is producing the live-action ‘Spider-Man’ Noir series starring Nicolas Cage for Amazon Prime Video.
Sony insiders also strongly defend the success of the three Venom movies starring Tom Hardy, which have grossed more than $1.8 billion worldwide. The last movie, ‘Venom: The Last Dance,’ grossed $473 million, the lowest ever for the franchise.
‘Venom’ is thought to have given Sony the false impression that audiences were going to see a movie about any Spider-Man character without Spider-Man in the movie. “All of these characters are famous because they went up against Spider-Man,” says Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “Unfortunately for Sony, they had a taste of success with ‘Venom,’ and that kind of spoiled everything for them, because they thought they could just spin off all of these characters. I don’t think they realized that ‘Venom’ could carry a franchise, whereas these other characters could not. To not have ‘Spider-Man’ in these films was the fatal flaw.”
Sony isn’t the only company to expand its superhero portfolio in the late 2010s, but the 2020s saw a sharp decline in both quality and audience interest.
The partnership, in which Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige and former Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal produced the Tom Holland-starring Spider-Man movies for Sony Pictures, has been incredibly lucrative for Sony, with worldwide grosses topping $3.9 billion. However, it also isolated Holland’s Peter Parker from any Sony project that wasn’t officially part of the MCU.
“The corporate entanglements when studios try to work together are really hard,” says one top executive with extensive experience in the superhero space. “Sony has no flexibility. They have a cage that they have to work in, and they’re just trying to make one good movie at a time.”
According to one Sony source, the deal with Disney never precluded Sony from using Spider-Man in its movies that didn’t bear his name; the Spider-Verse movies’ profusion of Peter Parkers, Gwen Stacys, and other various Spider-People certainly bears that out. But there was a feeling within the studio that audiences would not accept Holland’s Spidey suddenly popping up in a live-action film that wasn’t a part of the MCU, especially after ‘Spider-Man: No Way Home’ and the Marvel Studios projects ‘Loki’ and ‘Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness’ established definitive boundaries to the Marvel multiverse.
This seems to have had the greatest impact on ‘Morbius,’ which was originally scheduled to premiere in July 2020, well before ‘No Way Home’ and ‘Doctor Strange 2,’ but due to the pandemic, it wound up opening after them. The delay forced Sony into reshoots to account for how Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, introduced as part of the MCU in Homecoming, could be standing in the same room as Leto’s titular living vampire, a character who isn’t in the MCU — a fun conceit that didn’t seem like a big deal until the multiverse suddenly made it one.
Sony insiders insist that ‘Morbius,’ which earned $167.4 million globally, made a profit, but they admit that ‘Kraven,’ ‘Madame Web,’ and ‘Morbius’ were creative and critical flops.
