It's time to say goodbye to the SUMC superhero movie franchise. Just days before the release of Kraven the Hunter, Sony Pictures announced that the film would mark the end of the SUMC comic book spin-off series, which has chronicled the adventures of various villains and secondary characters from the Spider-Man comi—wait. WAIT A MINUTE. I'm sorry. What?! You've never heard of the SUMC franchise? You weren't even remotely aware that there even was such a thing as the Sony Universe of Marvel Characters? Well. SUMCs to be you.
The best way to understand the SUMC is that it was an experiment, almost certainly a sadistic one, with moviegoers as the guinea pigs. The experiment was designed to test just how deep the demand for superhero movies went. And the way that Sony tested that demand was to produce six astoundingly rotten movies, movies so consistently and profoundly terrible that it's almost impressive—like the filmmakers had to have some sort of reverse genius, or a stroke of incredible bad luck—for them to come out this crappy. Not only were most of these movies truly god-awful, half of them were built around characters that absolutely no one has ever cared about, and without any of the comic book context or character connections that might have made them interesting on the page.
