Where’s Spider-Man? A look at Sony’s Marvel Spinoffs.

After the mediocre audience reception to Kraven The Hunter, eyes turned to Sony asking, “What keeps going wrong?” Between Morbius in 2022 and Madame Web in 2023, it really felt like Sony wasn’t going to be able to capture the original magic of their most successful Spider-Man-adjacent film: Venom. And thanks to a recent Variety article, we’ve finally found out why that might be.

Since 2018 and the first Venom movie, Spider-Man fans—myself included!—have been under the impression that Sony’s deal with Disney limited the options Sony had for including the character in their films. But thanks to this exclusive info from Variety, we’ve now come to find out that they could have used Spider-Man the whole time. Spider-Man could have been in all of these movies. Venom could have had the white spider on his chest from the beginning.

Some of the reasoning for Sony’s hesitation to include the beloved web-slinger isn’t totally without merit. The studio worried audiences wouldn’t be able to accept Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in a context outside of the established Marvel Cinematic Universe. This logic is pretty sound, considering the set parameters of the MCU and the extreme limitations on that version of Spider-Man (I’ve complained about this in many articles before). This doesn’t follow why they wouldn’t just use their own established Spider-Man, picking up the phone and calling up Andrew Garfield for a feature.

Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man could have been easily referenced or even shown in any of the Sony films, and it wouldn’t have raised eyebrows. Dancing around who these characters are outside of their relationship with Spider-Man has been way weirder and more disorienting than a quick reference to Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man would have been. And now, finding out that there was nothing actually legally stopping them from doing that? The mind boggles.

Sony has defended their decision, holding up the success of the Venom films as if to say, “See? The people don’t want Spider-Man in their Spider-Man villain movies.” But doing so completely misses the point of what made their Venom movies successful. I’ve said it before: The Venom trilogy is a romcom! Audiences didn’t go into the movies expecting exciting, comic-accurate alien antihero shenanigans—the Venom films could be divorced from Spider-Man because they had something totally different and interesting going on. But what was compelling for Venom and Eddie can’t really be replicated for the likes of Morbius or Madame Web or ESPECIALLY Kraven the Hunter. Venom was successful because it was 2 hours of Tom Hardy being insane with a goopy CGI version of himself as they fell in love. Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven were not as successful because you took Spider-Man villains and put them in a situation without Spider-Man. For no reason.

There isn’t a lack of interest in these villains, and there is an audience who would appreciate these projects if they were presented in the context they were meant. A context of Spider-Man.

Bring back our boy: we miss him.