2024 was a pretty wild year for movies. If you’re Disney, things worked out pretty well, as three of the top four worldwide box office hits came from the studio. If you’re Sony, however, things didn’t go quite so well. Venom: The Last Dance was a solid hit, but there were two other movies in the studio’s Spider-manless Spider-Verse this year, Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter, and they were two of the biggest bombs of the year.
It will make for a fairly ignominious farewell for outgoing Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra. He’s set to step down at the end of the year but on his way out he spoke to the L.A. Times about his tenure. Overall he’s happy with his seven and a half years at the top of the studio, though he admits there have been missteps. Although he apparently denies Kraven the Hunter was one of them, saying…
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.
To be sure, many would disagree with that statement. Kraven the Hunter is sitting with a 15% score on Rotten Tomatoes and has yet to break $50 million in global box office despite being out in theaters for more than two weekends. That puts it in a class only slightly better with critics than Madame Web, though Kraven will have some work to do to even get to the $100 million that Web achieved.
And to be sure, Vinciquerra believes that Madame Web also qualifies as “not terrible” to the degree that the box office and the reviews indicated. The soon to be former CEO blames critics for destroying the films, for reasons he cannot fathom. He continued…
Let’s just touch on Madame Web for a moment. Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. 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.
As one of those terrible critics who was mean to these movies, I have to take issue with this idea. I wrote CinemaBlend’s Madam Web review, and I was probably nicer to it than some, but the movie was just straight up bad in my opinion. Critics had no reason to unfairly beat up on the films. They were just bad. The reason Madame Web was successful on Netflix is arguably people wanted to see how bad the movie was without buying a ticket.
The idea that the movie was better than its reviews and only flopped because of critics is silly. As proof, you don’t have to look any further than Tony Vinciquerra’s own reference to the Spider-Verse movies that were hits, the Venom films.
Yes, critics widely disliked the Venom movies too (though not to the extent of either Madame Web or Kraven) but audiences didn’t let that stand in their way of making the entire trilogy hits at the box office. The list of movies that critics hate and audiences still spend hundreds of millions of dollars to see is extensive. Reviews didn’t make these movies bomb.
The word is that Kraven the Hunter will be the last of the Spider-Man adjacent Spider-Verse movies to be produced. Sony’s outgoing CEO agrees that’s for the best, though in his case that's only because he believes that no movie in the current franchise could possibly be successful, regardless of quality. He 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.
The idea that the franchise needs to be rethought is one most would likely agree with, even if not everybody would agree with the reasons.
