Earlier this month, Sony Pictures released a brand new film, “Kraven The Hunter”, which is based on the classic Marvel villain from the”Spider-Man” comic books.  This film is the seventh film in the “Spider-Man” connected universe, which also includes “Venom”, “Madame Web”, and “Morbius”.

While Sony has had some great box office success with its animated “Spider-Verse” films, the “Venom” trilogy and its collaboration with Marvel Studios for the Tom Holland “Spider-Man” trilogy, the three solo movies featuring lesser-known characters have been a box office disaster. 

“Morbius” pulled in $167 million at the worldwide box office, while “Madame Web” only managed $100 million worldwide, which is still double the amount that “Kraven The Hunter” was able to pull in.

These box office failures have highlighted a major problem for Sony Pictures, which has the movie rights to the “Spider-Man” character.  Leading many to believe that Sony is going to drastically change course with its plans for its live-action films, as it’s become obvious that audiences aren’t interested in these films that don’t feature “Spider-Man” or at least “Venom”.

Throw in superhero fatigue, a drastic reduction in the quality of these spin-offs, and an overall desire to see Sony work with Marvel Studios to keep everything connected within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, as we saw with the Tom Holland appearances.

During an interview with the Los Angeles Times. the Sony Pictures CEO, Tony Vinciquerra, confirmed that the recent release of “Kraven The Hunter” was a disaster for them.

We’ve had mostly very, very good results. Unfortunately, [“Kraven the Hunter”] that we launched last weekend, and my last film launch, is probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years so that didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.

However, Tony has some different ideas on who’s to blame for the failure of Sony Marvel films, the critics.  

Let’s just touch on “Madame Web” for a moment. “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.

After some major box office failures, Sony is rethinking its future projects. It may work once again with Marvel Studios, like it did with the Tom Holland trilogy of movies, or do something totally different. Tom did confirm they are rethinking it.

I do think we need to rethink it, just because it’s snake-bitten. If we put another one out, it’s going to get destroyed, no matter how good or bad it is.

Roger’s Take:  When studio executives try to blame either the audience or critics for a movie underperforming, it’s basically just trying to shift the blame across to someone else to try to save their own jobs.  Some might even call it gaslighting by trying to blame the people they create the movies for rather than themselves. 

Ultimately, the Spider-Man-less spin-offs have been a disaster because they are bad films as the quality has been drastically reduced across the board and Sony got lucky with the first “Venom” film and figured after the huge success of superhero movies in the late 2010s, that it was a license to print money and now it’s not. 

Audiences aren’t going to pay money to see a bad movie in cinemas; they might watch it on a streaming service since it’s “free”, but money’s tight, and people can smell a dud a mile off.  Blaming critics just makes him look ridiculous, as the power of social media and good word of mouth is far stronger than the influence a critic might have.

What do you think of this excuse for the bad box office result?  Let me know on social media!

Roger Palmer

Roger has been a Disney fan since he was a kid and this interest has grown over the years. He has visited Disney Parks around the globe and has a vast collection of Disney movies and collectibles. He is the owner of What's On Disney Plus & DisKingdom. Email: Roger@WhatsOnDisneyPlus.com Twitter: Twitter.com/RogPalmerUK Facebook: Facebook.com/rogpalmeruk

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