It isn’t exactly a secret that Spider-Man has always been the crown jewel in Sony’s franchise portfolio, so much so that they turned down the chance to own the movie rights to every Marvel character because the web-slinger was the only one they were interested in. In fact, the comic book icon is so important to the studio that five of their ten biggest releases ever are all Spider-Man films.
The rest of the top ten is made up of two Bond movies, the recent Jumanji reboots and Venom, which shows that they don’t have as many big name brands to rely on as many of their competitors, which is one of the reasons why launching their own interconnected superhero universe has been such a high priority for them over the last couple of years, even with them ceding creative control over to Marvel Studios when it comes to the Tom Holland-led solo adventures.
Following recent delays, Morbius, Venom: Let There Be Carnage and the MCU’s Spider-Man 3 are all arriving much later than expected to slow down their plans for expansion, but in the meantime, the studio have finally given their cinematic universe an official title. While many people have simply been referring to it as Sony’s Marvel Universe, it turns out we’ve all been way off the mark and the franchise is actually called the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters, or SPUoMC for short. Just kidding, nobody’s going to abbreviate it like that, surely.
That’s a pretty unwieldy brand name that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue particularly easily like the MCU or DCEU, and it’ll be interesting to see if anyone involved in either Morbius, Venom 2 or even Spider-Man 3 that isn’t directly employed by Sony actually refers to it as that during each movie’s respective promotional trail.
