Sony, Stop!

“With great power, comes great responsibility.”

In 2014, Sony’s shared universe with Andrew Garfield’s iteration of the wall-crawler, died on the box office floor. A year later Marvel came knocking with an offer they could not refuse. With it, came a revitalization of their most profitable IP, Spider-Man. Which renewed Sony’s aspirations to build their own shared universe.

Sony became overconfident in 2018 when despite abysmal reviews, Venom was able to make a profit and a few months later Into the Spiderverse not only proved profitable for them but won the acclaim of the Academy which awarded them Best Animated Feature for their efforts.

Their ego was so high, that they ended their initial partnership with Marvel briefly, and fanboys everywhere panicked about Sony’s unwillingness to play nice. Marvel had revitalized their property to make it profitable once more after all.

Sony’s recipe for world-building is portraying the villains in their own movies before folding them into the life of a certain wall-crawler. But as Sony has proven, these films don’t function without their foil counterparts, the hero. A hero is only as good as its villain, which is to say, they can’t function without the other.

What about Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker you say? Director Todd Phillip’s character analysis, as entertaining as it was, would have benefited from the inclusion of Batman. Even if that came at the very end, or if it was used to sell the next entry through a button scene.

These villains weren’t designed to carry the story on their own, they were there to provide conflict for the titular hero. That’s why Venom fails, and now Morbius too.

Marvel is often referred to as a well-oiled machine, despite its blemishes, there is no denying that they are in the business of world-building that no studio has been able to replicate. See: Warner Bros’ sense of misdirection after Snyder led them astray, Disney/Lucasfilm with their Star Wars franchise. But Sony is a different breed, they don’t seem to be learning from their mistakes. Let’s not forget Sony’s interference in Sam Raimi’s third entry led to the weakest of the trilogy. They botched their reboot with Andrew Garfield thereafter, and now, after Marvel’s heavy lifting to honor the character, they seem to be on track to butchering their shared universe once more. It really begs the question of how Sony managed to produce Into the Spiderverse.