Very few months after ‘Venom 3’ comes the new installment of Sony’s Spider-verse. But unlike that closing of the trilogy starring Tom Hardy, ‘Kraven the Hunter’ has very unflattering prospects before it: forecasts predict between a measly 13 and 15 million dollars in collection in its first weekend, which which would make it the worst debut of this franchise, below the already quite disastrous ‘Madame Web’, which earned 15.3 million in its premiere.
The end of an era. The feeling of imminent disaster is of such caliber that many media outlets have echoed some forecasts from The Wrap that predicted that ‘Kraven’ would shelve this strange string of Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man. In reality, they are nothing more than the intuitions of an analyst, but the experiment is causing Sony to lose so much money (which has not commented on the article) that they have been considered valid, because they make complete sense. However, the complicated relationship between Marvel and Sony goes back a long way.
The Spider-Men of cinema. Spider-Man has had a long history of adaptations, each one, quite literally, of his father and mother. His first films were not even movies, but rehashes of the television series from the late seventies, and they were not seen in all countries (in Spain, for example, they were). In this crazy time we also enjoyed Toei’s Japanese Spider-Man, with Power Rangers-type monsters, in a very bizarre series that was hardly seen in Europe or America. Until 1999, Sony acquired the rights to adapt the character.
The classics. With that license, Sony made two animated series and the five films by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. But then the MCU arrived, and Marvel wanted to use its most iconic character: in February 2015 they reached an agreement whereby Spider-Man would be integrated as a secondary character in the Marvel films, while Sony could continue producing films of the character and of his usual villains, hence this string of movies with spider nemeses. In September the deal was renewed, and out of it came Tom Holland’s most successful film to date, ‘No Way Home’. Added to all this are the two (soon three) brilliant animated films of the Spider-verse, which will also be broken up into multiple spin-offs.
The villain fiasco. Sony’s plan seemed to be going well until it decided to go off the logical path: Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man. The prospect of generating your own MCU with one of the key pieces of that universe was too tempting, and from ‘Venom’ it was clear that steps were being taken in that direction: the post-credits scenes took sequences from the Spider-Man movies or they brought together villains from this subset of evil ones like Michael Keaton’s Vulture (from Tom Holland’s first film) with Jared Leto’s Morbius (drawing the bridge that linked Spider-Man with all these films).
The numbers are bad. Let’s review the figures that the films of this peculiar Spider-verse have had.
- Venom (2018) – Budget: $100–116 million / Revenue: $856.1 million
- Venom 2 (2021): Budget: 110 million dollars / Collection: 506.8 million dollars
- Morbius (2022): Budget: $75–83 million / Revenue: $167.5 million
- Madame Web (2024): Budget: 100 million dollars / Collection: 100.5 million dollars
- Venom – The Last Dance (2024): Budget: 120 million dollars / Collection: 472.9 million dollars
One observation: despite appearances, the box office of the third ‘Venom’ has not been good: it started grossing much less in its first weekend than its predecessors and was saved by the international box office. The numbers for the rest are visible, also seasoned by incomprehensible setbacks such as the re-release of ‘Morbius’ or Dakota Johnson’s statements.
A faded franchise. With this in mind, it is no longer that the possibility of resurrecting the franchise falls on the shoulders of ‘Kraven’, it is that a total shift in terms of the concept, aesthetics and content of these films would be necessary to make them work. The director of ‘Kraven’ has said that if there is a sequel it would be adapting ‘Kraven’s Last Hunt’, one of the most famous Spider-Man comics of all time. It seems that no one has passed on the note that for that they need… Spider-Man.
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In WorldOfSoftware | ‘Madame Web’ is the promise of a superhero movie that never comes. And therein lies part of its charm.
