Venom’s box office stung. Morbin’ time might be coming to an end, and no more studying Amazonian spiders. Furthermore, it seems that Sony is no longer cravin’ Kraven. The eagerly anticipated movie Kraven the Hunter, starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson as one of Spider-Man’s most well-known foes, opens this week. It’s the most recent in a string of Spider-Man-related movies that Sony has been putting out for a few years, but it appears that time is gone now.
Following Kraven’s release this week, “the future appears to lie in projects more directly connected to Spider-Man himself,” according to The Wrap. What does that mean exactly? The main one is Spider-Man 4, slated for release in July 2026, and stars Tom Holland as the follow-up to the massively successful Spider-Man: No Way Home. However, there are also Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, the third and last movie in the ground-breaking animated series, and Spider-Man Noir, the Nicolas Cage series in which the Oscar winner plays an older, multidimensional version of the character. All of those are being developed and will be available soon.
The Spider-Man movies have generally received positive reviews. Together, they have brought in $10.2 billion at the global box office, with No Way Home becoming Sony’s highest-grossing movie ever and Far From Home becoming the first Spider-Man movie to make over $1 billion globally. The Spider-Man-less movies haven’t faired as well. Regardless of their quality, it’s indisputable that the SSU made $2 billion without Spider-Man. In the end, graffiti with Tobey Maguire’s Variant was removed on Morbius, and the web-slinger briefly appeared in the post-credits sequence in Venom: Let There Be Carnage. Unfortunately, the box office wasn’t enough to keep the franchise going.
We presume that unless something genuinely extraordinary occurs this weekend, there won’t be any more Spider-Man movies soon. Originally known as the “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe” (or SSU) for short, these movies were subsequently renamed the “Sony Spider-Man Universe”. That includes flicks like Madame Web, Venom, Morbius, and Kraven the Hunter, which opens this weekend and reportedly won’t feature an end-credit scene that connects it to prior films. The studio’s unexpected success with Venom led to two sequels, but the most recent third installment ended that run. Although Kraven the Hunter is still up for debate, the poor taste of the other films will undoubtedly cause some harm. Morbius and Madame Web were spectacular failures in almost every regard.
But who knows? Maybe Kraven the Hunter will have a fantastic weekend, and we’ll see him again down the line! Most likely not, but perhaps. For the first time in a long time, Sony’s Spider-Man Universe will only focus on Spider-Man, but even that would not and could not happen until all other Spider-Man projects are completed.
(Via The Wrap)
