Morbin’ time may finally be over. No more researching spiders in the Amazon. Venom has been stung. And Kraven is, apparently, no longer what Sony is cravin’. This week marks the release of Kraven the Hunter, the long-awaited film about one of Spider-Man’s most famous villains, played by Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It’s the latest in an ongoing series of Spider-Man adjacent films Sony has been releasing over the past few years—but now, it seems, that time has passed.
The Wrap reports that after this week’s release of Kraven, “the future appears to lie in projects more directly connected to Spider-Man himself.” What exactly does that mean? Well, primarily there’s Spider-Man 4, the Tom Holland sequel to the mega smash Spider-Man: No Way Home, which is scheduled for release July 2026. But there’s also Spider-Man Noir, the Nicolas Cage series starring the Oscar winner as an older, multiverse version of the character, as well as Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse, the third and final film in the groundbreaking animation series. All of those are in the works and coming soon.
What’s not coming soon then—unless something truly miraculous happens this weekend, we assume—are any more Spider-Man films without Spider-Man. Films that were once called the “Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters” or SPUMC for short, and later the Sony Spider-Man Universe. That’s films like Morbius, Madame Web, Venom, and this weekend’s Kraven the Hunter (which apparently won’t have an end-credit scene linking it to other movies). Venom was a surprising hit for the studio, spawning two sequels, but the most recent third entry closed that series out. Morbius and Madame Web were spectacular failures in basically every way and while the jury is still out on Kraven the Hunter, the bad taste from the rest of those movies is sure to do some damage.
But maybe Kraven the Hunter has a huge weekend though and we see him again in the future. Probably not, but maybe. However, even if that happens, it wouldn’t and couldn’t be until after all the rest of the Spider-Man projects come first, which will be the first time in a long time Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is just about Spider-Man himself.
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