If there was a superhero with the power to make good comic book movies, one can imagine Sony would be all over trying to buy up the rights. Outside its splendid animated Spider-Man films and a team-up with Marvel on the recent trilogy of films starring Tom Holland’s masked webslinger, the studio has struggled. This is largely because it has inexplicably tried to manufacture interest in an assortment of superheroes and antiheroes who are part of Spidey’s world in the comics, but who the wider viewing public doesn’t know from Adam, the latest being Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web.
The one-time Fifty Shades of Grey star has been in the news this week after she effectively torpedoed her own movie by telling Bustle it was not the film she had signed up for, and hinted it had in any case been pretty much made by committee.
“Unfortunately, I’m not surprised that this has gone down the way it has,” Johnson said. “You cannot make art based on numbers and algorithms. My feeling has been for a long time that audiences are extremely smart, and executives have started to believe that they’re not. Audiences will always be able to sniff out bullshit.”
Johnson, who said she was unlikely to make another superhero film, added that “sometimes in this industry, you sign on to something, and it’s one thing and then as you’re making it, it becomes a completely different thing, and you’re like: ‘Wait, what?’”
Madame Web, which bombed at the box office and is one of the most critically reviled superhero movies of all time, follows 2022’s Morbius, which suffered almost exactly the same fate. A little better are the twin Tom Hardy-led Venom movies that Sony released in 2018 and 2021, though even these were far from superb.
Part of the problem here is that nobody was crying out for any of these films to be made – Sony executives just decided it would be a good idea to widen the Spider-Verse because these were the only characters they owned the legal rights to outside of the wall-crawler himself. Next up for the studio is 2025’s Kraven the Hunter, which will star Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the comic book big-game hunter (the movie version will reportedly be more of a conservationist). But given there’s no immediate sense of why anyone would actually want to see it, and that Spider-Man himself rarely turns up in these films, it’s hard to see it flourishing.
There does seem to be a solution, however. Sony’s decision to allow Holland’s Spider-Man to enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe was reportedly a combination of the box office failure of 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and a clause in the contract for its rights to the character, which meant that the studio must start production on a new dedicated Spider-film once every five years and nine months or give them up. Presumably this is why Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter have been earmarked for release in the current period, to avoid Sony accidentally losing its rights to Spidey while it is waiting for Marvel to stop twiddling its thumbs on what to do next with the Holland version of the webslinger.
Surely though, there is a better way forward here. The success of the “Home” trilogy proves that the problem with Spider-Man on the big screen was not the character, but Sony’s inability to avoid telling the same story over and over again every few years. Once released into a complex and fascinating multiverse that did not require him to constantly recycle his well-worn origin story, Peter Parker’s alter ego has flourished. Moreover, the recent movies offered up multiple ways forward for the character either within or without the MCU.
One suggestion is to revive the adventures of the Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield versions of Spidey, both of whom made a triumphant and thrilling return in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home. Thomas Haden Church, who played villain Sandman in both that film and Sam Raimi’s Sony-produced Spider-Man 3, back in 2007, this week told Comicbook.com he had heard rumblings in the ether that Maguire might soon be back in the suit.
“Sandman … there’s been some rumours that they might ask me to do another Spider-Man, and I’d do it tomorrow,” Church said. “You know, they never asked me to show up in another movie, another Marvel film, but I think Sam is going to do another Spider-Man with Tobey. That’s the one that – I was actually, they had an option for me to do Spider-Man 4, when there was going to be a Spider-Man 4. They had an option on me to come back. So, if it happens, that would be fantastic.”
The advantage of continuing Maguire-Spidey’s adventures, or even teaming him up with Garfield-Spidey, is that this could be easily accomplished without requiring Marvel’s input. While there is expected to be a fourth Spider-Man movie set in the MCU at some point, Holland does not yet seem to have decided if he will return to the role.
And yet fans are crying out for more stories in ways they never were prior to No Way Home’s release. Raimi, provided Sony gives him free rein and does not engage in the kind of studio interference that dogged both Spider-Man 3 and (seemingly) the new Spider-Verse movies, is the perfect director to take the project forward.
You never know, Sony might even be able to bring back characters such as Venom, Morbius and Madame Web in movies we actually want to see them in, ie as villainous foils for Spider-Man himself, rather than the heroes of their own stories. Whether Dakota Johnson could be expected to return after declaring herself pretty much done with superheroes, is probably still open to question.
