We all know Sony’s live-action Spider-Verse is a disaster, but the CEO of Sony Pictures doesn’t understand why they haven’t done well.
If I offered you two cards, one that said “a movie about Spider-Man” and one that said “a movie about Spider-Man’s villains, but he doesn’t appear in it,” which would you choose? Obviously the first, because most comic book villains aren’t very interesting on their own. Obviously, Venom is an exception to that rule, but he also looks like Spider-Man and has become an antihero in recent years, so he has a lot of appeal. But Morbius? Mrs. Web? Kraven? No. However, Sony made movies about them anyway, and now, speaking to the LA Times, Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra shared that he simply doesn’t understand why these movies didn’t do well.
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The most recent release, Kraven, has been a massive bomb, with a current worldwide box office take of nearly $46, not even half of its estimated $110 million price tag. Vinciquerra shared that this is “probably the worst release we’ve had in the seven and a half years” since it started, and went on to say, rather disconcertingly, “that didn’t do very well, which I still do.” I don’t understand it, because the movie is not a bad movie.” There is a big misunderstanding here that any kind of quality can compensate for a movie that no one wants, but in Vinciquerra’s opinion, it is actually the press’s fault that movies like Madame Web, and later Kraven, underperform.
“Madame Web underperformed in theaters because the press just crucified it. It wasn’t a bad movie and it did very well on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided they didn’t want us to make these movies with Kraven and Madame. Web, and critics just destroyed them. They did it with Venom too, but audiences loved Venom and made Venom a huge hit. These aren’t terrible movies, they were just destroyed by critics in the press, for some reason.
The reason was because the movies were bad, Tony! Venom was a hit because it’s a featured Spider-Man character, Tony! And also, each of its sequels did worse than the last at the box office, because all the other Sony movies without Spider-Man were very poorly received! Come on!
In any case, none of this matters, because that universe is now dead, and the focus is once again on the character everyone loves: Spider-Man. Who would have thought that would be a smart decision!
