Sony's Marvel Universe came to an abrupt, albeit long-overdue, end with last month's Kraven the Hunter. Between overwhelmingly negative reviews and a dismal opening weekend, that movie was the final nail in the coffin of a franchise which already had one foot in the grave thanks to Morbius and Madame Web (not to mention the Venom franchise's diminishing returns).
The trades have revealed that the studio is moving on from villain-led spin-offs, meaning everything from Venom 4 (widely believed to have been a story revolving around Flash Thompson's Agent Venom) to Silver Sable and Sinister Six have likely been scrapped.
Rumours have since swirled about Spider-Man Variants being Sony's new go-to, starting with the Spider-Noir, though only Spider-Man 4 and Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse have been officially announced beyond the Amazon/MGM TV series.
Among the previously announced movies thought to be somewhere on the horizon were El Muerto starring rapper Bad Bunny and Hypno Hustler featuring Donald Glover; neither received a particularly warm response from fans after being announced, with Sony seemingly handing out characters to whoever was willing to work with them.
Today, it's been confirmed that Sony has officially removed its final dated Marvel project from its release slate. That had been scheduled for June 27, 2025, though it's been obvious for upwards of a year that nothing was ready to fill a slot once reserved for any one of the titles listed above.
With that, Sony Pictures' Spider-Man Universe - or Sony's Universe of Marvel Characters - is dead. For now, at least.
We don't know whether the studio ever had a vague plan for these movies but it appears the idea might have been to pit the Sinister Six (now a group of anti-heroes who had never met Spider-Man) against Knull, God of the Symbiotes. How Madame Web was meant to factor into that is impossible to say.
Acknowledging that Kraven the Hunter was "probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years [I’ve been at Sony]," departing CEO Tony Vinciquerra recently said, "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.
Are you disappointed that Sony's Spider-Man Universe is no more? Or, like Spider-Man when he was buried by Kraven the Hunter in the comics, do you live in fear that it might one day rise from the grave?