Sony Pictures Is Stuck in Spider-Man's Web
Sony Pictures Is Stuck in Spider-Man's Web
How to explain 'Madame Web.'
In 2002, Spider-Man would be the first movie to gross over $100 million in a single weekend. Its success, joined with the success of 2000’s X-Men, kicked off the line of superhero movies we have today.
In order to hold onto the rights to Spider-Man, Sony has to keep making films either starring Spider-Man or movies in Spider-Man’s universe. If they fail to keep releasing Spider-Man movies, that will hurt the stock price and it could result in Sony losing the character to Marvel (and therefore Disney) entirely. And thus we get…
Madame Web
There is no sensible reason for Madame Web to exist in terms of “What a great character; this would make for a great movie.” In the comics, she’s a fringe character at best—an elderly blind woman who exists to give Spider-Man cryptic fortunes with her ability to see into the future. (Her real name is “Cassandra Webb,” in case there was any confusion about her literary origins.) Even in a Spider-Man movie featuring Spider-Man, and fans would likely be confused if this character showed up.
But Sony must make Spider-Man movies regardless of whether or not they have Spider-Man in them, so here we are. It’s likely the studio was hoping a Madame Web feature might net the same surprising success of 2018’s Venom. In the comics, Venom comes out of Spider-Man (there’s an alien symbiote that was attached to Peter Parker, but when Peter rejected it, the symbiote teamed up with Peter’s rival, Eddie Brock). But with no Spider-Man, they just skipped the Spidey logo and Spidey powers, turning Eddie Brock into a hulking alien beast. It’s not a particularly good movie, but thanks to a committed Tom Hardy performance and a simple premise (alien goo makes guy super strong), the film was a box office success. This led Sony to believe they were on the right track with superhero movies that came out of Spider-Man’s universe (and thus were owned by Sony) but didn’t have Spider-Man.
That is how you get 2022’s Morbius starring Jared Leto (a film that made a disappointing $167 million worldwide), Madame Web, and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter. Sony’s solution is to make Spider-Man adjacent movies, a weak idea only made weaker by the fact that the superhero bubble has burst. The thought that audiences will drag themselves out to the theater to see Madame Web is ridiculous, and even if the movie was great (and it is decidedly not that), you’d have to be deluded to think that audiences are eager to keep seeing Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man. At least when people try to make Batman stuff without Batman, it’s still in the larger DC universe, or it’s a known character like the Joker, or they just shuffle it off to television. In Teen Titans Go! To the Movies, there’s a joke about how there’s an upcoming film about Batman’s utility belt, and Madame Web is the cinematic equivalent of making that movie.
Of course, there’s the benefit of hindsight in all this. In 1998, Sony could have purchased all available Marvel heroes including Spider-Man. They wouldn’t have received X-Men or Fantastic Four (those lived with 20th Century Fox), but at only $25 million for the whole lot (a lot that Disney would purchase in 2009 to the tune of $4 billion), it looks like it would have been a steal. But Sony said, “No, thanks. We just want Spider-Man.” Back in the late 90s, that was a sensible move. There was no superhero boom, and no one would conceive of the idea of cinematic universes for another decade. Spider-Man was a name people knew, so Sony just wanted the Spider-Man rights, and now that’s all they have in terms of superheroes.
He’s a great character, but the marketplace of superheroes outpaced him. Furthermore, Sony made a series of mistakes with their stewardship of the character. Sam Raimi, who directed the first three Spider-Man movies, was moving too slowly on Spider-Man 4—and if Sony couldn’t get a new Spider-Man movie into production, they would lose the rights to the character. They fast-tracked a reboot that gave us the disappointing The Amazing Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man 2. These movies were so poorly received that they not only killed plans for a Sinister Six movie and The Amazing Spider-Man 3, but sent Sony to a unique partnership with Marvel Studios. The exchange was that Marvel Studios would take care of the movies starring Spider-Man with Sony reaping the profits, but then get to use Spider-Man in Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War, and Avengers: Endgame (Spider-Man also appears in the animated What If…? series but that feels like a little add-on to the deal that no one really minds since it’s an animated TV series that doesn’t affect the canon). This was a wildly lucrative deal for both studios as far as Spider-Man was concerned.
Sony’s problem was that shareholders, like J. Jonah Jameson, wanted more pictures of Spider-Man. However, the character was now wedded to the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Audiences expected him to cross paths with Iron Man, Nick Fury, and Doctor Strange. To go back to his own world seemed underwhelming, and without Marvel’s input, there was the risk of repeating the same mistakes of The Amazing Spider-Man movies where you spend a lot of money to lessen the character’s popularity. Animation could be a viable field, as Sony has seen with the terrific Spider-Verse movies, but it takes a few years to make an animated movie while you can theoretically turn around a superhero blockbuster in 18 months. Thus you get a Madame Web, which reportedly cost $80 million before you factor in prints and advertising. It does not look like an $80 million movie as much as it looks like someone desperately trying to sub in editing tricks for visual effects.
To return to Sony’s current predicament, I’d say that they should stop making bad movies about fringe characters that nobody wants. Sony clearly feels like that’s not an option. Spider-Man is too valuable to give-up, but he can’t be in every movie, and so we’re left with this bizarre assortment of side characters that strain to even fit the definition of a superhero movie. That’s before you even get to the bait-and-switch of Madame Web, which teases the appearance Spider-Woman, Spider-Girl, and another Spider-Woman, but doesn’t name them as such. Madame Web as a superhero movie is pretty much, “What if Spider-Man, but his only power is Spidey-Sense?” and a feature-length post-credits scene teasing a movie that will never happen because this one flopped. To say that Madame Web is the culmination of all the bad instincts of superhero filmmaking would cast the film as some apex of failure, when in actuality it is simply the mundane bean-counting of a studio churning out a feature to meet various financial obligations.
I’m sure at one point the script seemed promising, especially if you boil it down to its core of a loner who becomes a surrogate mother to three isolated young women. Even villain Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) has a core of an interesting idea of a guy who, in trying to avoid his fate, ends up creating that outcome. But all of that was clearly lost in script revisions and editing room tinkering. This is simply superhero gruel from a studio that feels unable to do anything else with its sole superhero property in the live-action realm. It’s clear that the studio feels like even a live-action Miles Morales movie (the hero of the successful Spider-Verse movies) might be a bridge too far for their creative abilities, so they’re keeping to perfunctory films like Madame Web where you can’t really say you’re risking the wrath of the fans because even the fans don’t care.
The wisest thing for Sony to do at this point is to expand their Spider-Man contract with Marvel to allow Marvel to use any Spider-Man character (including Venom), with some kind of revenue split. The alternative is for Sony to keep wasting money on movies like Morbius and Madame Web in a clumsy attempt to look busy.