- Tension: Sony controls some of the most valuable superhero IP in existence and keeps producing films that audiences actively reject — a paradox that suggests the problem was never the characters.
- Noise: The conventional explanation is superhero fatigue or poor casting, but Sony’s failures stem from a deeper strategic flaw: reverse-engineering movies from a rights spreadsheet rather than creative conviction, and assuming brand proximity substitutes for artistic purpose.
- Direct Message: Audiences didn’t reject Spider-Man — they rejected the assumption that association with a beloved thing is the same as being a beloved thing. The only question that matters is one Sony never asked: why does this story need to exist?
To learn more about our editorial approach, explore The Direct Message methodology.
Last Tuesday night, a 34-year-old film editor named Grace Cho sat in a nearly empty IMAX theater in Burbank watching Madame Web for the second time — not because she liked it, but because she was trying to understand how a studio with access to one of the most valuable intellectual properties in entertainment history keeps producing films that feel like they were assembled by algorithm. “It’s like watching someone with a Michelin-star kitchen make instant ramen,” she texted a friend halfway through. “And not even good instant ramen.”
Grace’s confusion is shared by millions. Sony Pictures, the studio that once redefined the superhero genre with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy and later produced the genuinely transcendent Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, has spent the last several years systematically destroying its own credibility in the comic book space. Morbius. Madame Web. Kraven the Hunter. Each one landed with the cultural impact of a stone dropped into a lake nobody was watching. Now, according to multiple industry reports, Sony is doing what it probably should have done three failures ago — rebooting its entire Spider-Man Universe with fresh creative talent and a fundamentally different approach.
The numbers tell a brutal story. Kraven the Hunter, released in December 2024, earned roughly $59 million worldwide against a reported production budget of $110 million — a catastrophic loss once you factor in marketing. Madame Web managed just $100 million globally on a similar budget. Morbius, despite becoming a meme so potent that Sony inexplicably re-released it to even worse results, was the canary in the coal mine nobody at the studio wanted to acknowledge. As Variety reported, the studio is now in active conversations with new writers, directors, and producers to reimagine its approach to Spider-Man adjacent characters entirely.
What makes Sony’s failures so fascinating — and instructive — isn’t just that the movies were bad. Bad superhero movies have existed since the genre began. It’s that Sony kept making the same kind of bad, over and over, as if the problem were individual execution rather than foundational strategy. They kept pulling obscure Spider-Man villains out of Marvel’s back catalog, hiring competent-but-uninspired directors, and expecting the Spider-Man brand halo to do the heavy lifting. It’s what psychologists call the escalation of commitment — doubling down on a failing strategy because admitting the strategy itself is broken feels more painful than absorbing another loss.
Marcus Hale, a 47-year-old entertainment attorney in Los Angeles who has worked on distribution deals for mid-budget superhero projects, put it to me plainly: “Sony had the rights. They had the characters. What they didn’t have was a reason for any of these movies to exist.” That distinction — between having permission to make something and having a purpose for making it — turns out to be everything.
Consider the contrast with what Sony does well. The Spider-Verse films, produced by Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, are among the most critically acclaimed animated features of the last decade. They succeeded because they started with a creative vision — what if we made a comic book that moved? — rather than a business mandate. Tom Holland’s Spider-Man films, made in collaboration with Marvel Studios and Kevin Feige’s meticulous universe-building, have collectively earned over $3.8 billion worldwide. The common thread isn’t Spider-Man. It’s creative conviction.
The live-action spinoffs had none of that. They were reverse-engineered from a spreadsheet — which characters does Sony control, which ones have name recognition, and how quickly can we get them into production before the rights situation gets more complicated? This is the entertainment equivalent of what a recent piece on American Eagle’s 2016 chatbot launch explored in the retail space — the impulse to adopt a format simply because the infrastructure allows it, without asking whether the audience actually wants it.
Yuna Kim, a 29-year-old content strategist in Seoul who covers Hollywood’s relationship with global audiences for a Korean entertainment outlet, told me something that reframed the whole situation. “In Korea, when a studio fails repeatedly, fans don’t just stop watching — they start questioning whether the studio respects the source material. Sony’s problem isn’t box office. It’s trust.” She’s right. And trust, once broken with a fanbase, follows a pattern eerily similar to what we’ve written about regarding consumer trust in the data privacy space — it can’t be rebuilt with promises. It requires demonstrated change.
The reported reboot will apparently focus on fewer projects with higher creative standards, potentially bringing in talent from outside the traditional superhero pipeline. There’s talk of courting directors from the A24 and independent film world — filmmakers who bring aesthetic identity rather than franchise management skills. If true, it would represent a genuine philosophical shift, not just a personnel shuffle. Sony’s new chairman, Ravi Ahuja, who took over in late 2024, seems to understand that the studio’s Spider-Man Universe didn’t fail because audiences are tired of superheroes. It failed because audiences can now instantly distinguish between a movie made with purpose and a movie made with rights.
That distinction is sharper than it’s ever been. The global audience — particularly younger viewers in the 18-34 demographic who drive opening weekends — has become extraordinarily sophisticated about reading studio intent. They grew up in the content economy. They can smell a cash grab from the trailer. As we explored in a piece about what screen time reveals about modern loneliness, today’s viewers aren’t just consuming content passively. They’re actively curating their cultural diet, and they’ve gotten ruthless about cutting empty calories.
This is also why the K-pop industry’s approach to IP offers an interesting parallel. Korean entertainment companies like HYBE and SM Entertainment have learned — sometimes painfully — that audiences develop parasocial relationships not with brands but with creative identities. When a group’s music feels manufactured without artistic input, fans detect it instantly and revolt. When it feels authentic, they’ll follow it anywhere. Hollywood’s superhero factories are learning the same lesson a decade later.
Marcus, the entertainment attorney, made one more observation that stuck with me. “Everyone in this town talks about IP as if it’s a magic word. But IP without vision is just a logo on a poster. Nobody buys a ticket for a logo.” He paused. “Well — they did, for a while. They don’t anymore.”
There’s something clarifying about Sony’s string of failures, something that goes beyond one studio’s strategic miscalculations. What audiences rejected wasn’t Spider-Man. They love Spider-Man. The box office data proves it — when the character appears in a film made with genuine creative ambition, people show up in enormous numbers. What audiences rejected was the assumption that proximity to a beloved thing is a substitute for being a beloved thing. That the association with greatness is the same as greatness itself.
Sony’s reboot, if it actually happens the way insiders describe, won’t succeed because they hired better directors or picked more popular characters. It’ll succeed only if the people making these films can answer a question that no one at the studio apparently thought to ask during the Morbius-to-Kraven era — a question so simple it’s almost embarrassing: Why does this story need to exist?
Every creative decision flows from that answer. And the absence of that answer — as Grace sitting alone in that Burbank IMAX could tell you — is something an audience feels in their bones, even if they can’t articulate it. They just know the seat next to them is empty. And they know why.
Feature image by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels
