Sony seems to have made it a divine calling to make the worst movies imaginable, because no matter how hard we pan its so-called Spider-Man Universe, the company remains incorrigible, and now rumor has it that the producers are planning to have their own team-up event featuring Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and possibly, the titular web-head.
Well, what do you know, folks, it seems that not even a string of critical misses and box office disasters can stop Sony from trying its hand at the superhero game. I never thought I’d say this, but compared to films like Madame Web, Morbius, and the latest installment in the Venom series, the SnyderVerse was actually a cinematic masterpiece. Perhaps we treated Wonder Woman 1984 too harshly. Maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea to let Joss Whedon behind the wheel of Justice League. Perhaps even the MCU’s Multiverse Saga isn’t as bad as it seemed at first glance. Please, give us anything, anything but new movies set in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.
May the gods of cinema forgive us all if this latest rumor has any merit, because it looks like Sony will now try its hand at a crossover movie tentatively titled Sinister Six, and featuring Kraven, Morbius, Vulture, Madame Web, and Venom. Whether or not Spider-Man himself will show up is unclear, but the main villain will be the god of the abyss himself, Knull, whom we last saw in Venom: The Last Dance.
For those of you who don’t know, the Sinister Six usually refers to the cream of the crop of Spider-Man’s villains, so why Madame Web is on this list is something I question too. Not that the rest of them have any business being on there, either, but I’m trying not to get overly nitpicky on a rumor.
Besides, from what we’ve seen so far, the writers for these films care as much about faithfulness to the comics as they do about learning scriptwriting itself.
You have to wonder at this point if Sony has gone completely insane. What even are they thinking? These films aren’t even making money, with the exception of Venom, and even that is not a guaranteed hit. The Last Dance has to gross at least $450 million to begin to turn a profit, and I seriously doubt that it’s going to get there without some significant word-of-mouth hype.
And even if we forget for a minute that continuing to make these films makes no sense from a financial perspective, how could we quite ignore the absolute stain of mockery they’re leaving on the medium itself? We can poke fun at the MCU all day long and wonder if this entire enterprise hasn’t been milked to a point that it has become self-defeating, but at least the directors and writers who work with Marvel Studios put in a minuscule effort to make these films presentable, their plots bearable, their characters human-like. Not so much hope with Sony’s gang, who seem to be making these films just for the sake of making them, not even bothering to care what the audience has to say about it all.
Reviewing Venom: The Last Dance, our own Charlotte Simmons gave the movie a 1.5 out of 5 stars, writing, “This whole enterprise needs to be a given a long, aggressive acid bath for its crimes against the world of cinema,” but it seems that Sony, for whatever reason, remains oblivious to the hint.
