Sony’s CEO has come to the defense of the studio’s recent Spider-Man spin-off films. Sony controls the rights to the Spider-Man franchise and, in recent years, they’ve tried to capitalize on that beyond Peter Parker. That began in 2018 with Venom, which turned out to be a huge hit. That paved the way for more, but success has remained elusive. This year saw the release of both Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter. Both of them flopped with critics and at the box office. Even so, the head of Sony has some thoughts on the matter.
In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, outgoing Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra commented on the recent Marvel flops. When asked about the studio’s performance under his leadership, Vinciquerra was largely positive – with one very big exception.
“We’ve had mostly very, very good results. Unfortunately, [Kraven the Hunter] that we launched last weekend, and my last film launch, is probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years so that didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.”
Directed by J.C. Chandor, the R-rated Kraven the Hunter has been disastrous so far. Against a budget north of $100 million, the film opened to just $11 million, which is one of the lowest openings ever for a Marvel movie. It has, thus far, made just $44 million worldwide. Similarly, Madame Web struggled to get to $100 million globally against an $80 million budget. Speaking further, Vinciquerra largely blamed critics for the failure of these films.
“Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”
For what it’s worth, Kraven the Hunter holds a terrible 16% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Madame Web is even worse at 11%. Both of those films were building on the back of 2022’s Morbius, which was also a critical disaster. At some point, it’s tough to blame critics when the product is consistently lackluster. Vinciquerra did rightly point out that the Venom films did well even against poor reviews. Still, the reviews for those films weren’t nearly as bad.
Here is the synopsis for Kraven the Hunter.
“Kraven the Hunter is the action-packed, R-rated, standalone story of how one of Marvel’s most iconic villains came to be. Aaron Taylor-Johnson plays Kraven, a man whose complex relationship with his ruthless gangster father, Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe), starts him down a path of vengeance with brutal consequences, motivating him to become not only the greatest hunter in the world, but also one of its most feared.”
Looking ahead, Sony is going to focus more specifically on films with Spider-Man in them. That includes Tom Holland’s Spider-Man 4, which is expected to begin filming early next year. That also includes the animated Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, which will conclude the Miles Morales trilogy. As for whether or not we’ll get more spin-offs? That’s for the new CEO to decide.
Kraven the Hunter is in theaters now.
What do you think? Do you agree with Tony Vinciquerra? Would you like to see more Spider-Man spin-off movies? Join in on the conversation over on Facebook or Twitter!
