Why Any Spider-Man Universe Is Doomed to Fail

No matter who is writing or drawing his adventures, there are a few immutable facts of Spider-Man. He always embodies the lines that closed his very first appearance by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko in Amazing Fantasy #15, that with great power must come great responsibility. And regardless of how often he screws up in his pursuit of that motto, Spider-Man will always try to get things right. He makes tons of mistakes — making a mess of things may as well be his true super power — but he never stops trying to fix them either.

So in a way, the news that Sony is now looking to relaunch its Spider-Man universe following the failures of movies like Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter is very much in keeping with that universe’s animating spirit. That was my first thought when I heard, from Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman on The Town podcast, that Sony’s broader Spider-Man universe was not dead. Rothman instead claimed that Sony would return to it eventually with a “fresh reboot [with] new people.”

Why not try again? After all, that’s what Peter Parker would do!

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To their credit, Sony has been making Spider-Man movies for 25 years now (a staggering number for those of us Olds who remember when there were zero Spider-Man movies) and over that time they’ve produced some of the century’s very best superhero films. They had the good sense to give Sam Raimi control of the series back in the early 2000s, and he delivered two era-defining blockbusters. Then they were canny enough to collaborate with Kevin Feige and Marvel on a new franchise, and all of the films they made together with Tom Holland as Peter Parker have been extremely entertaining.

So you can’t say that Sony does not understand Spider-Man — or at the very least they’ve hired people who understand him and gave them enough creative freedom to use that understanding properly. Unfortunately, no matter what Sony does from here on out — no matter who Sony hires — any Spider-Man universe reboot is doomed to fail.

That’s because the deal that first brought Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe starting with 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and then continuing through two Avengers movies and four solo Spider-Man films, limits what the character can do in films Sony makes without Marvel and Feige’s direct involvement.

While the specific terms of the arrangement between Marvel and Sony have never been disclosed, it’s obvious that Holland is largely restricted to appearances within the Marvel Cinematic Universe (where his Spider-Man movies are set) and not in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, where all of the company’s other superhero titles take place. Through six such SSU movies, Holland made only one blink-and-you’ll-miss-it cameo. That was in 2021’s Venom: Let There Be Carnage — during a scene where Venom is briefly transported to the MCU.

Surely Sony would have stuck Holland in one of these “Spider-Man movies” somewhere if they were allowed to under the terms of their Marvel agreement. Instead, Holland will next appear in Spider-Man: Brand New Day, coming to theaters this summer. Marvel and Sony brought back most of the same producers, writers, and stars from the previous Holland Spideys for this project, and I’m pretty optimistic it will be as satisfying as the earlier trilogy.

That’s not the problem. The problem is that even though Spider-Man: Brand New Day is a Sony Spider-Man movie, it’s not technically in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. It’s in the MCU.

In the years since Spider-Man shifted over to the MCU, Sony has produced six Spider-Man movies without Spider-Man in them, a concept that sounds like a joke from The Studio — except even Matt Remick wouldn’t make a Kool-Aid Man movie without the Kool-Aid Man in it. Sony’s done that six times!

Even under the best of circumstances, an entire universe dedicated to just the Spider-Man corner of Marvel Comics would be a tough assignment. The rights to adapt Spider-Man comics gives Sony a huge library of characters to exploit — almost all of them conceived to work in counterpoint to Spider-Man himself; to expose different aspects of his personality, or to challenge him in specific ways. By and large, they were never designed to exist on their own. Remove Spider-Man from the equation and you’ve removed most of what makes them interesting.

That’s how you wind up with a film as lifeless and pointless Morbius (a scientist turned vampire, who was conceived as a dark echo of Spider-Man’s own origin) or a thriller about Madame Web, an elderly blind woman who spent most of her early comic appearances confined to an elaborate throne — not exactly the ideal central figure for an action movie.

Madame Web has never even starred in a monthly Marvel comic book. But she got a movie because Sony held her rights because she debuted in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man comic. Compare that to Marvel’s movie universe, where Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, and Ant-Man were all individual heroes with solo series before Stan Lee and Jack Kirby bundled them together as a team. They could stand on their own before they stood as a group — which is why almost all of them have worked as anchors of solo movies as well in addition to The Avengers sequels.

As long as Marvel and Sony’s current deal remains in place, with Tom Holland firmly stuck in the MCU, a separate Spider-Man universe is a lost cause. The only way it could work is if Sony put another Spider-Man into it who was exclusively under their control — something that I’m not even sure they are allowed to do under their agreement with Marvel. And even if they technically could create a second movie Spidey, I doubt they would, because multiple simultaneous live-action Spider-Man franchises would create confusion in the marketplace, might hurt the box-office prospects of both series.

If Sony is going to let Marvel produce their Spider-Man movies with Tom Holland for the foreseeable future, then their best bet is to double down on the good Spidey films they were already making: The animated Spider-Verse franchise. Into and Across the Spider-Verse are the opposite of Sony’s live-action Spider-Man universe in almost every single way. They are gorgeous and funny and deeply true to the spirit of Spider-Man as a character.

Best of all, they are filled with a comical amount of Spider-Men and Women: Peter Parker, obviously, but also Miles Morales, Gwen Stacy, a noir Spider-Man, a future Spider-Man, a robotic Spider-Man, a cartoon ham Spider-Man, a Spider-Man that’s a horse, and so on. Instead of trying to milk any tiny amount of creative juice these minor Marvel characters might possess, the Spider-Verses crammed every interesting version of the friendly neighborhood wall-crawler into a single story — and the results speak for themselves.