After ‘Kraven’, Sony’s Marvel movies are not dead. Here’s why.

Towards the end of Sony Pictures’ latest Marvel film “Kraven the Hunter,” the titular anti-hero — played with maximum abs by Aaron Taylor-Johnson — experiences a harrowing hallucination in which he is surrounded by a horde of spiders. It’s a clear allusion to the character’s greatest nemesis in the Marvel comics, Spider-Man.

It’s also almost certainly the closest the character (or at least Taylor-Johnson’s version of him) will ever get to confronting the web-slinger.

“The Collar” is expected to take one of the lowest opening weekends ever for a Marvel superhero film, making it the third of Sony Pictures’ failed attempts to spin off a secondary Spider-Man character into its own film franchise after 2022’s “Morbius” with Jared Leto and last February’s “Madame Web” with Dakota Johnson. The looming box-office failure almost certainly spells the end of that effort at the studio, which a knowledgeable Sony insider attributed to an industry-wide “irrational exuberance about superheroes” that has ultimately led to the general decline of the genre’s preeminence as a leading force at the box office .

What it doesn’t mean, however, is the end of Sony’s Marvel Universe.

First, technically there has never been a Sony Marvel Universe or a Sony Spider-Man Universe or any other official designation similar to the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the recently relaunched DC Universe. Sony has never approached its comic book adaptations with the level of intended narrative coherence exemplified by the studio’s casual, lowercase and rhetorically clumsy phrasing of its superhero movies: Sony’s universe of Marvel characters.

Second, Sony remains deeply invested in making movies about Spider-Man, the beloved Marvel character who launched the current era of superhero cinema with 2002’s “Spider-Man.” The fourth Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland is expected to start filming in 2025 in collaboration with Marvel Studios (more on this later); the animated “Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse” is in production, concluding the Oscar-winning trilogy focusing on Miles Morales; and Sony is producing a live-action “Spider-Man Noir” series starring Nicolas Cage for Amazon Prime Video.

Sony insiders are also staunchly defending the success of the three “Venom” movies starring Tom Hardy, which have grossed more than $1.8 billion worldwide. The latest film, “Venom: The Last Dance,” has earned the lowest grosses yet for the franchise ($473 million), especially against the $856 million global haul of 2018’s “Venom.” But “The Last Dance” cost $120 million — a measly amount for a superhero movie — and it bettered the international take of 2021’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage.” So there’s really no financial reason for Sony to stop making “Venom” movies anytime soon.

But “Venom” — built around a wildly popular character with his own distinct cultural imprint — also gave Sony the false impression that audiences would flock to see a movie about any Spider-Man character without Spider-Man in the film .

“All these characters are famous because they went up against Spider-Man,” says Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “Unfortunately for Sony, they had a taste of success with ‘Venom,’ and it kind of ruined everything for them because they thought they could just spin off all these characters. I don’t think they realized that Venom could carry a franchise , whereas these other characters couldn’t. Not having Spider-Man in those movies was the fatal flaw.”

Sony is far from alone in aggressively expanding its superhero portfolio in the late 2010s, only to face a sharp decline in both quality and audience interest in the 2020s. But the studio was caught in a unique catch-22 of its own making: the unprecedented deal between the studio and Disney’s Marvel Studios to share Spider-Man in the MCU, starting with 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” and 2017’s “Spider-Man : Homecoming.” The partnership – which sees Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige and former Sony Pictures chief Amy Pascal produce the Tom Holland-led Spidey films for Sony Pictures – has been fabulously lucrative for Sony, with worldwide revenue of $3.9 billion. But it has also cut off Holland’s Peter Parker from Sony projects isn’t it officially part of the MCU.

“The intricacies of the business when the studios are trying to work together are really tough,” says one executive with extensive experience in the superhero space. “Sony has no flexibility. They have a cage that they have to work in and they’re just trying to make one good movie at a time.”

According to a Sony source, the agreement with Disney never precluded Sony from using Spider-Man in its films that did not bear his name; The “Spider-Verse” movies’ abundance of Peter Parkers, Gwen Stacys and other various Spider-People certainly confirms that. But there was a feeling at the studio that audiences wouldn’t accept Holland’s Spidey suddenly appearing in a live-action movie that wasn’t part of the MCU, especially after “Spider-Man: No Way Home” and Marvel Studios projects “Loki” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” established definitive boundaries for the Marvel multiverse.

This seems to have had the biggest impact on “Morbius,” which was originally scheduled to premiere in July 2020, long before “No Way Home” and “Doctor Strange 2,” but due to the pandemic that opened after them. The delay forced Sony to reshoots to explain how Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, introduced as part of the MCU in “Homecoming,” could be standing in the same room as Leto’s living vampire, a non-MCU character — a fun conceit, that didn’t seem like a big deal until the multiverse suddenly made it one.

Dancing around Spider-Man without ever getting to use him also contributed to the feeling that these spin-off films were merely exercises in, ahem, craven opportunism. “You can sense the cynicism a mile away,” says one veteran producer. “They grind products and it feels like it. There is no quality control.”

Privately, Sony insiders acknowledge that “Kraven,” “Madame Web” and “Morbius” are creative and critical duds (though they also insist that “Morbius,” which earned $167.4 million globally, turned a profit). Going forward, they say the studio will have to be more choosy about which — if any — of the studio’s stable of Spider-Man characters will be elevated to their own movie franchise.

There is also another possibility. “You could hire another Spider-Man,” says Bock. “It doesn’t have to be Tom.”