Six movies in, the series about characters linked to the web-slinger is looking ever ropier. More are on the way – but with no sign of the obvious way refresh the franchise
T
he 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.
