Five Years Ago This Week, Marvel’s Biggest Event Proved Sony’s Spider-Man Spinoffs Were Doomed

Sony’s Spider-Man Universe never really had a chance. The relationship between Marvel Studios and Sony has always been a strange one. Marvel sold the film rights to Spider-Man and his associated characters to Sony back in 1999, and it didn’t take long for the wall-crawler to prove to be a box office hit. The success of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy foreshadowed the superhero boom and the rise of the MCU, but it became a huge problem for Marvel after the formation of Marvel Studios. It meant Spider-Man couldn’t be part of the nascent MCU.

Sony and Marvel eventually reached a new deal, of course; a partnership of sorts, one that’s subject to several bouts of renegotiation over the years but has nevertheless brought Tom Holland’s Spider-Man into the MCU. Naturally, Sony wanted a piece of the action, with Venom launching Sony’s Spider-Man Universe – a shared universe of spinoffs, MCU-adjacent, resulting in films like Kraven the Hunter, Madame Web, and of course, the Venom trilogy. And yet, five years ago, one epic Marvel event showed why those spinoffs were always going to fail.

“King in Black” Showed the True Potential of Venom

Five years ago, the “King in Black” event reframed elements of the Venom franchise as a massive part of the Marvel Comics universe. This featured Knull, the God of the Symbiotes, who hailed from the dawn of the universe itself and sought to consume all of life and light in his infinite blackness. Knull killed the most powerful Avenger in a moment, tearing Sentry apart in a brutal and violent scene, and cloaked the entire world beneath a layer of symbiotes. Knull was immediately positioned as one of the greatest threats the Avengers had ever faced.

This is the beauty of a shared universe; characters from one story can cross over with another. Sony had access to heroes and villains who were already related to one another, minimizing the potential scale and impact of any crossover, because it’s par for the course for Spider-Man villains to cross paths with each other; there’s nothing remarkable about it. Venom: The Last Dance introduced Sony’s Knull, but he could never fulfill the potential of the comics. “King in Black” proved it, pitting Knull against gods and monsters, Avengers and X-Men, something Sony could never do.

Sony’s Spider-Man Spinoffs Could Never Be What the Studio Wanted

There’s a sense in which Venom set the pattern, right from the start. Sony was forced to rewrite Venom‘s origin, removing Spider-Man and the cosmic “Secret Wars” epic that first exposed Peter Parker to the symbiote. Sony bosses quickly realized there was a Spider-Man-shaped hole in their shared universe, and trailers repeatedly teased Spider-Man without ever actually showing him. It was an implicit admission that this entire crossover project had a flaw, an absence where it should have had a star.

The Venom movies were a success, albeit with diminishing returns; the first film grossed over $850 million worldwide, but The Last Dance failed to break $500 million. The other spinoffs in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe failed to land, with Madame Web barely breaking $100 million. Looking back, there’s a sense in which Madame Web was the most desperate of these projects, serving as the ultimate prequel to Spider-Man – it literally told the tale of Peter Parker’s birth. All this did, though, was signpost the void.

And over in the comics, “King in Black” showed that the problems were bigger than an absence of Spider-Man. The magic of the Marvel Cinematic Universe lies in bringing disparate elements together; it’s why The Avengers was a hit back in 2012, with a star-spangled super-soldier teaming up with a Norse god and a billionaire genius. Sony could never do anything like that, even by pulling characters out of their MCU movies in multiversal riffs.

It’s easy to see why Sony wanted to get in on the shared universe model, but the studio simply didn’t have a wide enough catalog of heroes and villains. Characters like Knull would always feel so much lesser than the comics that had inspired them, because they couldn’t operate in the wider context they deserved. It was, ultimately, no surprise that Sony’s Spider-Man Universe failed; it was set up to fail. Now, the studio continue to make Spider-Man spinoffs (including next year’s Spider-Man Noir), but that shared universe seems to be over.

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