Sony Kills the Spiderverse
Tom Rothman has had enough. The chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures is done with superheroes.
He got bumped up from Tri-Star to head Sony Pictures after his predecessor ran Columbia Pictures so far into the ground Sony Japan was seriously considering dumping it on the highest bidder.
The problem was that Columbia was in such bad shape nobody was interested. In the post-DVD-crash world, franchises were king and Sony only had two. Spiderman and Adam Sandler. Everything else was moribund.
And Spiderman was failing. In a period where Disney-Marvel was breaking records, routinely, Sony-Marvel was losing ground. The Andrew Garfield Spiderman movies were making less and less money. Consequently, Sony executive and Spiderverse producer Amy Pascal’s plans to create a series of Spiderverse movies were put on hold after she and Michael Lynton were shitcanned over Ghostbusters 2016 among other failures.
Rothman was so done with it that he ordered a deal struck with Disney to have Fiege work his magic on Spiderman. In exchange, Disney got to use Spiderman for some of their projects. It worked. Sony’s Spider-man movies started moving the box office take in the right direction. Far From Home pulled in $1.1 billion.
That said, one Spiderverse film was far enough along in production that it made sense to finish it out and put it in theaters. Venom. The box office take was $856 million worldwide, which was more than enough to keep Tom Rothman interested.
The Spiderverse films were taken off the shelf and put into production in 2021 when Spiderman No Way Home made $1.9 billion and the story is that Disney didn’t have too much to do with that one. Sony and Amy Pascal were feeling ver confident in their ability to create a Spiderverse separate from Disney Marvel. Things were set up at the end of No Way Home for Tom Holland’s Spidey to start a new life in his own universe.
I think there was some interest in using Andrew Garfield’s Spider-man in Sony’s movies and I can guarentee you that Disney Marvel was dead against the idea. After the huge success of No Way Home you would have expected an imediate annoucnement but Tom Holland’s fourth movie is only now getting underway. I strongly suspect that there was a huge fight behind the scenes to keep Tom Holland as the sole Spidey.
And then the disasters started rolling in.
Venom 2 pulled in $300 million less than the first movie. Depending on the budget it may have lost money.
Morbius was an outright bomb as well as being totally unwatchable at $160 million. While Venom three did better than that, it didn’t do well enough to justify its continued existence.
Then came the disaster of Madame Web whose only success was in being comically bad.
Silk: the Spider Society has been canceled by Amazon before it went into production.
Kraven the Hunter is going to be the last of the Spiderverse movies unless it defies all box office expectations and pulls in a billion dollars. However, this seems profoundly unlikely. Kraven has the worst possible release date for a Superhero movie and that may be by design. I suspect Rothman wants it to fail badly so he can pursue Spider-man projects for second-party providers. Amazon is moving forward with Spider-Noir starring Nic Cage.
Sony has (unlike Disney)n at least kept their budgets within the bounds of sanity but it doesn’t change the fact that their Spiderverse movies have burned through about $500 million in straight losses.
The only spiderverse films that have made any money at all for Sony are the ones (prepare yourself for a shock) that have fucking Spiderman in them!!!
It doesn’t even have to be Peter Parker, the into the Spiderverse movies have had budgets of about $100 million and the last one took down about $700 million in receipts.
The truth is Sony Spiderverse movies never stood a chance for the simple reason that no one wanted to see a feature film about supporting characters without the main character. A story about Dr. John Watson The Crime Doctor would interest no one if Sherlock isn’t in it. The same goes for Kraven the Hunter.
