Outgoing Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra said “critics just destroyed” the Madame Web box and Kraven the Hunter.
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 city wall-crawler. Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sony introduced its own cinematic universe with Venom in 2018, the first in Sony’s Spider-Man universe of Marvel characters, a spin-off that grossed $856 million at the international box office without the spider-crawler. walls.
“Spider-Man does well before second-hand movies, he does better with second-hand movies, and now that we have our own universe, he’ll play the other characters as well,” Vinciquerra said at the time. “I think we’re quite capable of doing what we want to do here. »
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.
“Most of us got very, very smart results. Unfortunately, [Kraven the Hunter] that we presented last weekend, and my latest theatrical release, is probably the worst opening in seven and a half years, so it didn’t do very well. “Because the movie is not a bad movie,” Vinciquerra, who ends his 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 talk about Madame Web for a moment. Madame Web underperformed in theaters because the press just crucified her,” Vinciquerra said of the film starring Dakota Johnson as clairvoyant paramedic Cassandra Webb and Sydney Sweeney, Celeste O’Connor and Isabela Merced as a trio of spider women from long standing. Scathing reviews had called Madame Web an incompetently made Marvel “knockoff,” and the film flopped on Valentine’s Day with just $100 million worldwide.
“It wasn’t a bad movie and it did very well on Netflix,” Vinciquerra added. “For some explanation, the press didn’t need us to make those movies based on Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the public enjoyed Venom and made Venom a huge hit. They are not horrible movies. They were destroyed by press criticism, whatever the explanation. »
When asked if Sony Pictures would reconsider its Spider-Man strategy when current Sony Pictures COO Ravi Ahuja takes over as CEO, Vinciquerra said, “I think we want to reconsider, just because he was bitten by a snake. ” If we publish anything else, it will be destroyed, no matter how clever or bad it is.