One of the most baffling choices in blockbuster filmmaking the past decade has been Sony’s desire to make a Spider-Man-free Spider-Man universe using a collection of assorted villains from the comics. While it started promisingly with Venom, which evolved into a fan-favorite trilogy, its other entries, namely Morbius, Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter have gone so poorly Sony is simply throwing in the towel, focusing only on Spider-Man 4 and more Into the Spiderverse projects going forward.
We may have some insight into why this happened at all, as it seems that Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra, who will step down and transition to a new role in 2025, believes these are legitimately good movies, and blames movie critics for why they failed.
He told the LA Times Kraven the Hunter was “probably the worst launch we had” in his almost eight years at Sony, but “I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.”
Despite him, star Aaron Taylor-Johnson and director JC Chandor making a “please come see it, it’s good,” case, it was savaged by critics (17% on Rotten Tomatoes) and while fan scores are higher (a 74%) its performance has been dismal, bringing in only $43 million worldwide.
If that wasn’t enough, Vinciquerra goes on to extol the virtues of Madame Web, as well:
“Let’s just touch on Madame Web for a moment,” Vinciquerra said. “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 is contradicting himself in the same quote, given that he is saying both that low critic scores are responsible for the failure of Kraven and Madame Web, but then immediately says that despite similarly low scores for Venom (a 30%), “audiences loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit.” A+B = C and in this case, by definition, audiences also did not love Madame Web and Kraven, ergo there were not hits.
Critics can be harsher than audiences at times, certainly, but blaming them for the failure of a universe entirely conceived on the success of one movie, Venom, given that what followed was a bunch of villain movies no one actually wanted to see, does not make a terrible amount of sense. I also do wonder if he’s misinterpreting the meme campaigns that existed for movies like Morbius and Madame Web that resulted in things like say, high audience scores as a joke. People convinced Sony that people actually wanted Morbius so badly they had it do another (poor) run in theaters. Kraven, meanwhile, did not look goofy enough to meme, so it was just…ignored.
It is genuinely concerning that a CEO of a major motion picture studio can look at a movie like Madame Web and say that it’s good with a straight face. But now that this bizarre villain era is over, we’ll see if things improve from here, or whether Disney will eventually just absorb all this and create something better out of it.
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