NFL
By: Rick O’Donnell
Despite the success with Spider-man: Homecoming/Far From Home/No Way Home, Sony’s Spiderverse has been a huge flop. Not even in a way that’s salvageable. The entire franchise is hanging on by a thread as they continue to pump out movies such as Venom, The Last Dance, Madam Web, and Kraven the Hunter. No disrespect to any of the cast and crew involved, but these movies were set up to fail to begin with. To this day, no one understands how a “Spider-verse” gets by without … ya know, Spider-man?
Initially, it was thought that Sony and Disney had a deal in place where they agreed Tom Holland’s Spider-Man wouldn’t appear in these films to not dilute his MCU role, but those rumors turned out to be false. Another made it seem that Sony didn’t believe fans would be accepting of his role outside of the MCU continuity as well, fearing his role in the shared universe, his stand-alone movies, and his appearance in the others wouldn’t be as accepted, and those turned out false as well.
What’s the real reason they didn’t use Spider-man in their films? No one can give a definitive answer, but there’s one reason. The obvious is you didn’t want the character to overshadow the other characters. Let’s be honest here, Sony saw the numbers DC’s The Joker did at the box office and decided to steer into that fan base. They tried to build origin stories for their villains rather than cram yet another Spider-Man origin down our throats. People loved Holland as Peter Parker, and his role was huge in the greater MCU, but if they utilize him in these movies, then they don’t have separate franchises.
This is the main reason they dropped the ball. Don’t come at me with that lame “superhero fatigue” excuse. Deadpool and Wolverine just did over $1 billion at the box office. They wrote half-hearted stories for obscure villains and tried to milk the Spider-verse for all it’s worth with little to no effort.
You can’t tell me there wasn’t a story to be told that could build the Spider-verse. Hell, you had Tom Hardy as Venom, and the MCU set up the multiverse for you in Doctor Strange. Fans went nuts seeing Tobey McGuire, Andrew Garfield, and Tom Holland share the screen. If you didn’t want to bring Tom Holland into that fold, it would’ve been just as easy to swap him out for Garfield or McGuire, but they didn’t.
Again, they wanted this big return with little to no effort. If I were Sony, with the multiverse on the table, I would’ve easily brought in Andrew Garfield, who deserved another shot, to fight Tom Hardy’s Venom. That duo on screen would be box office gold. Since Venom was expanding past the title character and trying to bring in Carage and the rest of the symbiotes, how hard would it have been to have the trio somehow team up to take Venom down?
No Way Home also set up a throwback to the proposed Sinister Six movie that was scrapped. With the multiverse on the table, it wouldn’t have been hard to have each Peter Parker struggling with his own villains and writing that into a team-up/Avengers-style blockbuster, but again, Sony chose to go the cheaper route. Everyone has been talking about how much they’d love to see the comic book accurate Deadpool and Spider-Man team up, and both are in multiverse stories. There’s a handful of avenues they could’ve taken but never did.
They were never invested fully, and so neither were the fans. They cheapened out on the big names in favor of trying to maximize profitability and leaned on villains no one needed origin stories for. Spider-Man has a huge fan base and a long list of characters that could’ve been used to build this franchise. Unfortunately, Sony had no idea how to use them. If that’s the case, maybe it’s time to sell the rights back to Disney and move on.
