Tom Rothman, CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment Motion Picture Group, told The Town with Matt Belloni that Sony’s Spider-Man Universe isn’t dead, but it is, as Belloni put it, getting a “fresh reboot” with “new people.” This comes after the box-office and critical bombs of Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter over the last three years.
The backlash to Morbius and Madame Web alone was enough for Kraven the Hunter director J.C. Chandor to plead before the film’s release, “People have got to give us a chance and come out and support this film, and literally try to wash away some of the other stuff that’s happened. Give our film a chance.” But Kraven turned out to be just as bad as the others. Even the most successful films of the bunch, Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and Venom: The Last Dance, have been embraced more for their unintentional camp than their actual quality.
The reboot strategy is one that Sony has tried before with their Marvel characters, and it didn’t go particularly well last time. After producing three well-regarded Spider-Man movies directed by Sam Raimi between 2002 and 2007, the studio brought Marc Webb on to helm a reboot series in 2012. Only two out of the planned three movies were ever made. After that, Sony collaborated with Disney to bring Spider-Man into the massively successful Marvel Cinematic Universe, even though Sony owns the film rights to the character. It was, as Belloni said in the interview, “kind of a tail-between-the-legs moment to have to go to Disney and say, ‘Listen, we kind of ran this into the ground, we need you to bring this back.’”
Rothman disputed Belloni’s accounting of how the Disney deal went down, arguing that the MCU crossover has been hugely successful for Sony, but it’s hard to ignore the evidence that Sony has struggled to figure out how to make a good comic book movie on its own. Rothman didn’t share any other details about what a rebooted SSU might look like.