Sony regrouping on Marvel movies but their universe isn’t dead after all

Reports of my death have been somewhat exaggerated…

We reported last week that after the devastating release of Kraven: The Hunter, Sony’s Spider-man adjacent cinematic universe – ie without Spider-man and not really part of the MCU – was about to role over and die, with all future focus being on the third Spider-verse movie and the fourth Tom Holland MCU Spider-man movie.

But it seems that Sony isn’t quite ready to write it off yet, despite rumours online that they’re preparing to move all rights to Marvel.

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Sony, according to insiders, is still fiercely defending the success of Tom Hardy’s Venom trilogy, believing that this is proof that their movies have the potential to be profitable, although it might be argued that Venom is one of Marvel’s best-known – and loved – anti-heroes and no matter who did those movies, success was likely but word is that despite the trilogy closing and Hardy seemingly done, there might still be a desire to follow Venom on in other movies.

“Unfortunately for Sony, they had a taste of success with ‘Venom,’ and that kind of spoiled everything for them, because they thought they could just spin off all of these characters. I don’t think they realised that Venom could carry a franchise, whereas these other characters could not. To not have Spider-Man in these films was the fatal flaw,” says Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock.

And he’s likely not wrong.

One of the aspects that muddied the waters was Sony and Marvel’s partnering on the Spider-man appearances in the MCU which were very, very profitable for Sony but, on the downside, they had the rights to all these Spider-man characters but because Holland’s Spider-man was in the MCU, they couldn’t put him in those movies.

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However, it seems – and the Spider-verse movies always made me wonder about this – that Sony were never stopped from using Spider-man in their movies, hence they were able to have Miles Morales in the Spider-verse movies but it seems that Peter Parker was up for grabs too but it was feared that Holland being in their movies would only confuse audiences on why Venom etc weren’t in the MCU and, I dare say, might be why we had the very confusing appearance of Micheal Keaton’s Vulture in Sony’s Morbius movie and also probably explains why spider-man was originally in the script for Kraven too.

The most frustrating thing is that Sony has Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield right there and, with just a little more care being put into the scripts, could very likely have had their movies take place in either star’s already established universe or universes.

Damn it, Sony!

So, no, it seems that Sony’s Marvel universe is not dead, merely put to rest while they regroup and work out the best way to movie forward (good scripts, maybe? Just an idea) but it seems likely that the Spider-man adjacent universe is going to return at some stage and maybe we’ll see Andrew Garfield’s Spider-man return or perhaps we’ll get the live-action Miles Morales we’ve waited years for.

Thoughts, webheads? I know you have them…

It looks like Kraven the Hunter will be the end of Sony’s Marvel-adjacent cinematic universe

Sources: Variety, Deadline,