Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra spoke to the Los Angeles Times about the failure of ‘Madame Web.’ He claimed that Marvel movies are not terrible, but that they are being unfairly criticized by critics.
Vinciquerra said that ‘Kraven the Hunter’ was “probably the worst launch we had” in the nearly eight years he’s been at the studio, adding: “I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.”
‘Kraven’ opened in theaters on Dec. 13 to a paltry $11 million, the lowest debut yet for a Sony-released Marvel movie. The movie’s current domestic box office total stands at just $18 million, while its global haul is $43 million. These are more or less catastrophic results for a superhero movie and cap off a lackluster year for Sony comic book movies after ‘Madame Web’ flopped with $100 million worldwide and ‘Venom: The Last Dance’ became the franchise’s lowest-grossing entry.
“Let’s just touch on ‘Madame Web’ for a moment,” Vinciquerra said. ‘Madame Web’ underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of ‘Kraven’ and ‘Madame Web,’ and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with ‘Venom,’ but the audience loved ‘Venom’ and made ‘Venom’ a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”
He added, “It’s snake-bitten. If we put another one out, it’s going to get destroyed, no matter how good or bad it is,”
While Vinciquerra doesn’t believe Marvel’s Sony films are terrible, critics would disagree. ‘Madame Web‘ has an 11% score on Rotten Tomatoes, while ‘Kraven‘ didn’t fare much better, earning a 16% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
In addition to ‘Madame Web’ and ‘Kraven,’ Sony’s Jared Leto starrer ‘Morbius’ also received negative reviews and performed poorly at the box office.
