Chris Snellgrove | Posted
Haters of Sony’s superhero movie featuring a Spider-Man villain got some mixed news last week. in the middle Kraven the HunterDue to its box office failure, Sony has reportedly abandoned plans to create a world where Spidey’s rivals are interconnected. However, Variety reports that the studio will continue to work in this genre with future releases including: Beyond the Spiderverse And live-action spiderman black A series starring Nicolas Cage. No one can deny the ambitious quality of the Spider-Verse movies, but the news that Sony will continue making superhero movies depresses me because it exemplifies everything that’s wrong with the genre.
A taste of Sony superhero movie success
As Jeff Bock, an analyst at Exhibitor Relations, points out, Sony’s fatal flaw is that “they experienced success by: venom,” and this got them thinking they could make a “superhero” movie built around Spidey’s colorful gallery of rogues. He noted that the studio failed to realize “that while Venom can carry a franchise forward, other characters can’t.” Not including Spider-Man in his villain movie was a “fatal flaw.” Because most villains are unconvincing in themselves and have disastrous results. Madame Web Sony has proven equally incompetent when it comes to focusing on superheroes rather than supervillains in its underbaked films.
Who are these heroes?
This shows the first clear example of Sony’s arrogance. They inexplicably assumed that audiences didn’t want any kind of name brand recognition for these movie protagonists. Marvel has been working hard to make Venom a comic book character since the ’90s, so they had a lot of material to draw from when making his solo movie. However, characters like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven aren’t that popular or developed, and it would have been crazy for the MCU to focus on them like they did releasing a Vulture or Mysterio movie without Spider-Man.
Speaking of the MCU, comparing it to Sony shows just how much the latter studio has put the cart before the horse when it comes to superhero movies. While Marvel has cast some big names in the past, many of its fan-favorite characters are played by relative unknowns, including Tom Holland. Marvel took its time to bring in good actors who would win over audiences, but it seemed like they were hoping for familiar stunt casting in movies like Kraven and Madame Web. kickass Now he’s an antihero!) alone will be enough to arouse the audience’s interest.
No web connection
What’s worse is that Sony has never found a way to properly tie in superhero movies. We get gestures towards a shared universe like the MCU’s Vulture. Morbiusand There’s no way to go home It’s Marvel’s post-credits confirmation that Sony’s film is in its own multiverse. But the movie never seemed to build anything or capitalize on a shared world. It wouldn’t matter if individual heroes and villains were incredibly attractive, but that’s simply not the case.
The point of all this is that Sony is trying to make more superhero movies. There’s basically no sign that they’ve learned from the critical and commercial failures of superhero movies. Morbius, Madame Weband Kraven the Hunter. The studio seems committed to investing millions of dollars into objects that look and feel like remnants of what you’d find on Tubi’s virtual bottom shelf. We can only hope that they internalize at least one lesson going forward. The thing is, audiences might actually want Spider-Man in a Spider-Man universe movie.
Or maybe we’re hoping that an ironic “It’s Mobin’s Time” meme will give this terrible film a cultural footprint that it could never enjoy on its own grim merits.
Source: Variety
