Five years ago, Sony took a major gamble by giving an iconic villain the superhero treatment. 2018’s Venom doesn’t exactly defang the title character, but he’s decidedly less menacing than he is within the context of a Spider-Man adventure. That’s because the friendly neighborhood webhead doesn’t have much of a presence in the Sonyverse anymore — but that hasn’t stopped the studio from building a franchise around his most formidable adversaries.
