Sony Pictures CEO Blames Critics for Spider-Man Spinoffs Bombing in Theaters: “These Are Not Terrible Films”

In 2019, the symbiotic relationship between Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios ended in divorce. After failing to reach an agreement on financing terms for the Spider-Man movies, Sony Pictures chairman and CEO Tony Vinciquerra said “the door is closed” on the wall-crawler in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sony had launched its own cinematic universe with 2018’s Venom, the first in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe of Marvel characters, a spinoff that webbed up $856 million at the global box office without the wall-crawler.

“Spider-Man was fine before the event movies, did better with the event movies, and now that we have our own universe, he will play off the other characters as well,” Vinciquerra said at the time. “I think we’re pretty capable of doing what we have to do here.”

[RELATED: A Brief History of Sony’s Unmade Spider-Man Universe Spinoffs]

While Sony and Marvel ultimately mended their relationship to keep Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in the MCU, Sony’s film division continued to produce Spider-Man spinoffs without Spider-Man. The films that followed were 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage, 2022’s Morbius, and this year’s Madame Web, Venom: The Last Dance, and Kraven the Hunter, which was skewered by critics and bombed with one of the worst ever openings for a Marvel-based movie at the box office.

“We’ve had mostly very, very good results. Unfortunately, [Kraven the Hunter] that we launched last weekend, and my last film launch, is probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years so that didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film,” Vinciquerra, who is ending a seven-year tenure at Sony Pictures on Jan. 2, told The Los Angeles Times.

Vinciquerra blamed Sony’s Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter flops on the press and critics. The six films in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe averaged a “rotten” score of 28% on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, with the highest being Venom 2 at 58% and Madame Web the lowest with a dismal 11% approval from critics.

“Let’s just touch on Madame Web for a moment. Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it,” Vinciquerra said of the film starring Dakota Johnson as the clairvoyant paramedic Cassandra Webb and Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor, and Isabela Merced as a trio of future Spider-Women. Scathing reviews had branded Madame Web an incompetently-made Marvel “knock-off,” and the film bombed over Valentine’s Day with just $100 million worldwide.

“It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix,” Vinciquerra added. “For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.”

Asked about whether Sony Pictures should rethink its Spider-Man strategy when current Sony Pictures Chief Operating Officer Ravi Ahuja takes over as CEO, Vinciquerra said, “I do think we need to rethink it, just because it’s snake-bitten. If we put another one out, it’s going to get destroyed, no matter how good or bad it is.”