Whether you call it "Sony Pictures' Universe of Marvel Characters," "Sony's Spider-Man Universe," or every insulting expletive under the sun, it's fair to say the studio's attempt at building its own Marvel Universe has largely failed.
While the financial success of the Venom trilogy is undeniable, each instalment has made less than its predecessor and they've all received a largely negative response from fans and critics. As for Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter, they rank among the biggest superhero movie flops ever.
After the latter bombed, we heard that Sony had decided to give up on its villain-led Marvel movies to instead concentrate on Spider-Man 4 (produced hand-in-hand with Marvel Studios), Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, and Amazon's Spider-Noir.
However, knowing there's still money to be made, the studio might be planning to take a new approach to these spin-offs.
According to scooper @MyTimeToShineH, there are rumblings that future projects will revolve exclusively around Spider-Man Variants. So, that could range from Spider-Punk to Kaine, Spider-Ham, Spider-Man 2099, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Woman, and countless others.
This could be viewed as good news because it's arguably what Sony should have been doing from the start.
Now, on the one hand, they can keep fans happy by letting the main Peter Parker hang out with The Avengers under the watchful eye of Kevin Feige. And, on the other, they can cash in on all manner of other spider-themed heroes (who can fight the villains they're so obsessed with).
Without a decent creative team in place, though, we might end up seeing a long list of amazing characters go the way of Eddie Brock and Dr. Michael Morbius. Fortunately, it sounds like Miles Morales will be heading Marvel Studios' way based on past reports.
Departing Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra recently addressed the failings of the studio's Marvel movies and blamed critics for them not working out. Acknowledging that Kraven the Hunter was "probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years [I’ve been at Sony]," he added, "That didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film,"
"Let’s just touch on Madame Web for a moment," Vinciquerra continued. "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 concluded.
Stay tuned for updates as we have them.