Sony’s Spider-Man Universe (SSU) has been, let’s face it, a complete and utter disaster. While the Venom films did well at the box office, the rest of them failed drastically. Many people have questioned the wisdom of trying to do a Spider-Man cinematic universe without, well… without Spider-Man. Written down, it seems just plain ridiculous, doesn’t it? Yet, that’s exactly what Sony did.
Kraven the Hunter, the latest film in the franchise, hit cinemas this December and proved to be as aggressively mediocre as everyone expected it would be. After that came news that some Spider-Man fans breathed a sigh of relief about: the SSU was coming to an end. There would be no more attempts to drag movies out of obscure Spider-Man characters. TheWrap quoted an anonymous Sony insider as saying, “The movies just aren’t good,” and few people would have disagreed with that.
However, one of those aforementioned few people so happens to be a powerful player in the movie industry. The outgoing Sony Pictures CEO, Tony Vinciquerra, gave an interview to the Los Angeles Times today and he expressed bafflement that the SSU movies did so badly. He genuinely thought they were great!
While admitting that Kraven the Hunter was “probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years [of his tenure]”, Vinciquerra complained, “I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.” Critics would disagree, however. Kraven scored a pathetic 15% on RottenTomatoes, with reviewers criticizing the script, dialogue, and CGI.
Vinciquerra went on to blame the press for the failure of the SSU as a whole. “Let’s just touch on Madame Web for a moment,” he said, when the subject of that movie came up. “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.”
He went on, “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.”
There’s a lot to unpack there. First of all, Madame Web most likely did well on Netflix because no-one was willing to pay full price for it in theaters, but they were willing to check it out on the streaming service, something they were already paying for, to see if it was really as bad as everyone was saying. Morbid curiosity is responsible for many bad movie’s Netflix success.
Second of all, Vinciquerra’s argument falls to pieces once he brings up Venom. If he believes the press “decided that they didn’t want us making these films” then why was Venom such a box-office success? Critics gave that film poor reviews, too, and the same with its sequels. So did the media play a role in the failure of the SSU or didn’t it? Vinciquerra seemingly can’t decide.
Venom came out the clear winner of the SSU because Venom is simply one of the most popular Spider-Man characters, and one of the few who can actually carry a movie without Spider-Man. The other characters who got their own SSU movies—Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven—simply don’t have the same passionate fandoms. Vinciquerra has failed to realize that, and thus it’s only fair to lay the SSU fiasco at his feet, not at the feet of critics.
Published: Dec 26, 2024 12:23 pm