“These are not terrible films” – Sony Pictures’ CEO just doesn’t get why nobody wanted to watch Spider-Man films that don’t have Spider-Man in them

We all know that Sony’s live-action Spider-Verse is a hot mess, but Sony Pictures’ CEO doesn’t get why they haven’t done well.

If I were to offer you two cards, one that said “a film about Spider-Man” and another that said “a film about Spider-Man’s villains, but he’s not in it”, what would you choose? Obviously the first one, because a majority of comic book villains are just not very interesting on their own. Venom is obviously one exception to that rule, but he also kind of looks like Spider-Man, and has become an anti-hero in recent years, so there’s some strong appeal there. But Morbius? Madame Web? Kraven? Nah. Yet Sony made films about them anyway, and now, speaking with the LA Times, Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra shared that he just simply doesn’t get why these films didn’t do well.

The most recent release, Kraven, has been a massive bomb, with a current worldwide box office gross of almost $46, not even half of its estimated $110 million price tag. Vinciquerra shared that this is “probably the worst launch we had in the seven-and-a-half years” since he started, continuing on to say, quite bafflingly, “that didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.” There’s a big misunderstanding here that any kind of quality might make up for a film nobody wants, but in Vinciquerra’s opinion, it’s actually the press’ fault for films like Madame Web, and subsequently Kraven, underperforming.

“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.”

The reason was that the films were bad, Tony! Venom was a hit because he’s a prominent Spider-Man character, Tony! And also each of its sequels did worse than the previous one at the box office, because all the other Sony Spider-Man-less Spider-Man films were received so poorly! Come on!

In any case, none of this matters anyway, because that universe is dead now, with the focus once again being on the character everyone actually likes: Spider-Man. Who’d have thunk that’d be a smart decision!