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Does anyone out there really know why Spider-Man himself never appears in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe? We are now five movies into the studio’s ongoing effort to spin an entire cinematic web from the sticky residue of the masked webslinger’s famed rogue’s gallery, and there is still no sign of the little guy himself.
There have been three whole (deeply average) Venom movies without so much as a sniff of New York’s friendly neighbourhood wall crawler. Jared Leto managed to completely suck the life out of rooms both on and off screen during the putrid events of Morbius without even glimpsing Peter Parker’s crime-fighting alter-ego swinging through the skyscrapers in his peripheral vision. And Madame Web was too busy delivering cryptic monologues about fate to fit our hero into her already sagging narrative net.
Perhaps this is just Sony turning the anticipation dial up to 11 and leaving it there while we all sit through another dozen half-arsed supervillain spin-offs, like lost souls trapped in the comic book movie equivalent of Dante’s Purgatorio. Or maybe Marvel and Sony have made some Faustian Hollywood pact that allows the former to keep making perfectly serviceable collaborative Spider-Man movies (and Peter Parker-infused Avengers flicks) as long as the latter continues to deliver a cinematic party where the host never shows up and the DJ only plays ads for Spotify Premium. Perhaps Sony has been trying and failing to feature Spidey for years, but keeps accidentally dropping him in the wrong universe – is he currently starring with the Hotel Transylvania gang somewhere on Earth-199999?
Either way, this week sees the release in cinemas of Kraven the Hunter, about the villainous big game poacher known mostly for his enmity towards Parker in the comics. It’s probably the last chance for one of these films to connect with audiences, since Sony has no public plans to continue the series now that Tom Hardy’s Venom appears to have reached the end of his slimy, tongue-waggling fever dream of a cinematic journey. And it’s probably the last opportunity for Sony to bring Spider-Man to the party proper.
Asked whether he felt Kraven the Hunter should fight Spidey in a future instalment, star Aaron Taylor-Johnson said this week that he felt his character should “go toe-to-toe with some superheroes that we know”, which is pretty much what all fans have been saying since the beginning of this thing. The correct answer, of course, would just have been “yes”. While Kraven the Hunter is mildly interesting in his own right, he becomes a thousand times more intriguing as an obsessive, unrelenting foil for the masked webhead himself.
In the comics, Sergei Kravinoff is a tragic figure, equal parts hunter and haunted, driven by pride and obsession. His greatest story, 1987’s Kraven’s Last Hunt, is a spiky, brooding tale of mortality and madness. If Sony taps into that psychological depth, Kraven could transcend his status as a fur-clad meme generator. But even if this one does emerge as a surprise, late-in-the-day superior entry, there will always be the nagging feeling that this entire venture is the equivalent of booking Ringo to play a one-man show on the bongos, when everyone really just wants the Beatles. There is little to suggest that Sony is planning to give fans what they really want this time out. Someone wise once wrote that insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Sony has been frustratingly coy about Spider-Man’s presence in this universe. It’s as if he were a secret menu item at a fast-food chain that’s only available at 3am during a lunar eclipse in the third fiscal quarter of a leap year – provided of course that the hopeful purchaser makes sure to whisper “with great power” to the cashier.
While the multiversal shenanigans of No Way Home and Across the Spider-Verse have left the door wide open, we’re still waiting for you-know-who to walk through it. Theoretically, there are at least two Peter Parkers (those played by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield) and one Miles Morales who are not currently being used by the Marvel Cinematic Universe and might easily start turning up in Sony’s sandpit without diminishing the chances of Tom Holland’s version continuing to work his magic on Earth-616. Isn’t that the whole point of the multiverse, that we can all have our superhero cake and eat it?
The brilliance of No Way Home was that it combined the ultimate in Spidey fan service with a pleasingly nutty and epic rollercoaster ride. Sony should have realised then and there that this was its one true path forward, and used the film as its jumping off point for future episodes. Apart from anything else, a spin-off based on the continuing journey of Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin would have benefited from 20 times the hype of Morbius, a cinematic train wreck so bad it was memed back into multiplexes only to bomb all over again.
Instead we’re being handed yet another Spider-Man Universe movie without Spider-Man. It’s as if Kraven were prowling through tropical forests in search of completely absent prey, on a strange planet where only plant-life exists. You can dress it up with as many fur coats and jungle-themed set pieces as you like but, at the end of the day, it’s just a guy yelling at trees.
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