Madame Web
One of the most baffling choices in blockbuster filmmaking in the past decade has been Sony’s desire to make a Spider-Man universe without Spider-Man using a collection of various comic book villains. While he got off to a promising start with Venom, which grew into a fan-favorite trilogy, his other entries, namely Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter, have fared so poorly, Sony just doesn’t make it, focusing only on Spider- Man 4 and more. In Spiderverse projects in the future.
We may have some insight into why this happened, as it appears that Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra who will step down and move into a new role in 2025he believes these are legitimately good films and blames film critics for the reason they fail.
he told the LA Times Kraven the Hunter was “probably the worst launch we’ve had” in his nearly eight years at Sony, but “I still don’t understand why the movie isn’t a bad movie.”
In spite of himself, star Aaron Taylor-Johnson and director JC Chandor make a “please come see it, it’s good” case, it was savaged by critics (17% on Rotten Tomatoes) and while fan scores are higher (74%) Performance was dismal, bringing in only $43 million worldwide.
Craven
If that wasn’t enough, Vinciquerra goes on to extol the virtues of Madame Web, too:
“Let’s touch Madame Web for a moment,” said Vinciquerra. “Madame Way did poorly in theaters because the press just crossed it. It wasn’t a bad movie and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided they didn’t want us to make these Kraven and Madame Web movies, and the critics just trashed them. They did that with Venom too, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a huge hit. They’re not terrible movies. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”
He contradicts himself in the same quote in that he also says that low critical scores are to blame for the failure of Kraven and Madame Web, but immediately says that despite the same low score for Venom (30%), “audiences loved It Venom and made Venom a huge hit.” A+B = C and in this case, by definition, common also I didn’t like Madame Web and Kraven, so there were no hits.
Morbillion
Critics can be harsher than audiences sometimes, sure, but blaming them for the failure of a universe built entirely on the success of one movie, Venom, given that what followed was a bunch of badass movies that nobody really wanted to see, it doesn’t make an awful lot of sense. I also wonder if he’s misreading the meme campaigns that existed for movies like Morbius and Madame Web that resulted in things like say, high audience ratings as a joke. People convinced Sony that people really wanted Morbius so much that they got him another (bad) run in theaters. Kraven, meanwhile, didn’t seem stupid enough to make a meme, so he was just… ignored.
It’s truly disturbing that a CEO of a major motion picture studio can look at a movie like Madame Web and say it’s good with a straight face. But now that this weird era of villains is over, we’ll see if things get better from here, or if Disney will just absorb all of this and make something better out of it.
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