Let's talk about Sony Pictures and their Spider-Man Universe — or as it should be called, the Spider-Man-Adjacent Universe of Movies Nobody Asked For.
The timeline of failure is remarkable:
- Venom (2018) — $110M budget. Actually made money ($856M worldwide) despite being not great. This is what gave Sony the delusion that they could build an empire.
- Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) — $110M. Made $502M. Less than the first. Warning signs ignored.
- Morbius (2022) — $75M. Made $163M. A genuine flop that became an internet joke. Sony re-released it because of the memes. It flopped AGAIN.
- Madame Web (2024) — $80M. Made $100M. A movie so bad that the lead actress seemed to be apologizing for it during the press tour.
- Kraven the Hunter (2024) — $110M. The pattern continues.
The Fundamental Problem
Sony owns the film rights to Spider-Man and his associated characters. That's a goldmine. But Sony's approach to mining it has been to pick the most obscure characters possible and build movies around them without Spider-Man in them.
Imagine you own the rights to a pizza franchise. The pizza is what people want. Instead of making pizza, you decide to sell breadsticks as their own thing. Not even good breadsticks — breadsticks that don't taste right because you left out the garlic. That's Sony's Spider-Man Universe.
Nobody was asking for a Morbius movie. Nobody googled "Madame Web origin story." These characters exist in comics as supporting players. They're not the headliners. Making a Morbius solo movie is like making a solo movie about the waiter who served Bruce Wayne dinner one time.
The Writer-Director Problem
Look at the creative teams Sony attaches to these projects:
- Morbius — Directed by Daniel Espinosa, who had zero blockbuster experience. Written by Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless, who also wrote Dracula Untold and Gods of Egypt. Both are on the short list of worst blockbusters of their respective years.
- Madame Web — Directed by S.J. Clarkson, primarily a TV director. The script went through multiple writers and rewrites. The final product feels like multiple different movies stitched together.
Sony consistently hires cheap talent for these movies. Not because there aren't great directors and writers available — but because great directors and writers read these scripts and say no. The only people who say yes are people who need the paycheck or genuinely believe they can fix something that's broken from the concept up.
The Crew Fallout
Every one of these movies employs hundreds of people. VFX artists, stunt coordinators, set designers, costume teams, sound engineers. These are skilled professionals who sign on for months of work.
When you work on Morbius, that goes on your resume. When the movie becomes the internet's favorite punching bag, your work — regardless of how good it was — gets swept up in the joke. The grips who lit those scenes perfectly, the costume designers who nailed the look, the sound team who delivered clean audio — none of them get credit. They just get associated with a meme.
Sony keeps greenlighting these movies because the risk calculation makes sense to a spreadsheet. The actual human cost — the careers, the time, the morale of hundreds of crew members working on something everybody knows is going to be bad — doesn't show up on the balance sheet.
The Solution Nobody at Sony Wants to Hear
Stop. Just stop. You have Spider-Man. That's the product. Make Spider-Man movies. Let Tom Holland do his thing. Make animated Spider-Verse movies (those are actually great). Stop trying to make Morbius happen. It's not going to happen.
Or, if you insist on making spinoffs, hire writers and directors who have a genuine vision for the character. Pay for quality. Develop scripts for years, not months. The reason the Spider-Verse movies work is that they were labors of love with genuine creative passion behind them. Morbius was a corporate mandate with a deadline.