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The old adage goes that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. The news this week that Sony is planning to reboot its once much-vaunted, now completely risible “Spider-Man Universe”, shows there must be a few Hollywood executives who still believe in it.
Speaking on The Town podcast this week, the studio’s chief executive and chair Tom Rothman was asked about the future of the bafflingly superfluous superhero franchise that gave us three lukewarm Venom films, the odious Morbius and the tonally anaemic Madame Web. Despite scant clamour for more movies, he confirmed that the saga will live to fight another day. “Is the larger Spider-Verse dead?” Rothman was asked. “No,” he replied. “Are you going to go back to those at some point?” asked his interviewer. “Yes,” Rothman said. “But it’ll be a fresh reboot?” “Yes.” “New people?” “Yes, yes.” Rothman then added: “Scarcity has value … you got to make the audience miss you.”
For those fortunate enough to have missed these films, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is, or was, a series of movies about people (mostly villains or antiheroes) who have at some point met the masked wallcrawler in the comics. Spider-Man himself does not appear in them, and nobody really knows why. Of the six films released so far, only the first Venom from 2018 was an unequivocal box office hit netting $856m worldwide, yet its reviews constituted a collective shrug. Its weaker and even more narratively optional sequels, 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage and 2024’s Venom: The Last Dance, managed $506m and $478m respectively.
After this, Morbius in 2022 ($167.5m worldwide on a $75m budget) achieved the rare feat of being more successful as a cultural punchline than as an actual movie. Madame Web (2024 - roughly $100m from a budget north of $80m) proved even less enticing. And 2024’s Kraven the Hunter ($62m worldwide, budget reported $110m–plus) was about a man hunting Spider-Man who never encounters him – the cinematic equivalent of Moby-Dick without the whale.
Quite where Rothman’s announcement leaves us is anyone’s guess. Why do Sony keep attempting to mine box office gold from the vaguest of Spider-Man-adjacent characters? Marvel also makes Spidey films, the incredibly successful Tom Holland-led movies, whose success also financially benefits Sony. Was the masterplan to irritate audiences so much that they went back to the rival series? If so, it worked wonders.
Perhaps what Rothman is hinting at is that the studio will exercise restraint. Maybe we’ll only get one carefully rationed movie about Spider-Man’s second cousin’s former chiropractor – rather than six in quick succession. And yet there are persistent reports that Sony must continue producing Spidey-linked films at regular intervals or risk the rights reverting to Marvel. This feels a lot like the sort of boardroom handcuffing that gave the world Roger Corman’s micro-budgeted, early 90s take on The Fantastic Four. Such corporate machinations, suffice to say, are not traditionally the noblest reason to greenlight a blockbuster. But at least if this were what was going on, it would partly explain why some of these films have proved so abjectly dreadful.
Strangely, there appears to be no known reason why Sony can’t stick Spider-Man in these movies. The next Marvel film, Spider-Man: Brand New Day with Tom Holland’s Peter Parker, arrives in July. But Sony could easily launch a different wallcrawler and call it a multiverse thing. As long as the films are decent, nobody would complain. So why doesn’t it?
Presumably if the reason isn’t contractual, it has to do with fear - fear of confusing audiences, of weakening the partnership, of accidentally strangling the golden goose while attempting to harvest its eggs. Spider-Man: No Way Home made just under $2bn worldwide. Why disturb a mutually profitable arrangement when there are peripheral characters to monetise instead? If that has been the thinking - emboldened, perhaps, by Venom’s early financial success – it has since been comprehensively dismantled by the inability of subsequent instalments to generate either sustained box office momentum or critical goodwill.
In contrast, DC’s new universe is going to have two Batmans – Robert Pattinson’s brooding, grungy world’s greatest detective, and another yet-to-be-cast caped crusader capable of trading blows with Superman and assorted lantern-wielding space policemen. Multiverses are no longer taboo. Audiences can cope. Is it too much to ask that the only live action Spider-Man universe in existence has at least one Spidey in it? Scarcity may have value. But at some point you do actually need the whale.
