As the only one of the “Big Five” major studios in Hollywood that doesn’t own or operate its own streaming service, Sony experienced the height of the pandemic completely differently to any of its contemporaries.
It proved to be fairly beneficial for the company, too, with several titles being sold off to various platforms, while Spider-Man: No Way Home and Venom: Let There Be Carnage combined to bring in almost $2.5 billion at the box office. However, there’s an element of throwing stones in glass houses from boss Tom Rothman, who criticized the competition – and particularly Pixar – in an interview with IndieWire for avoiding the multiplex altogether and scarpering directly to the on-demand circuit.
“People were making conclusions about long-term in a short-term crisis. When other entertainment companies were laying off thousands or in some cases tens of thousands of people, we did not. We invested in our people and we invested in our content. Everyone says that Tom Cruise saved the box office. I can tell you that Spider-Man was before that and it showed that movies in movie theaters are enduring. A lot of people were doing a lot of silly things.”
Of course, the obvious question is whether or not Sony would have done the exact same thing if it had a streaming platform of its own, but it takes a confident executive to blast the rest of the industry while simultaneously cobbling together a superhero shared universe that could be deemed “a silly thing” in and of itself.
After all, this is the same chairman who let Morbius bomb twice over, gave the thumbs-up to El Muerto before pulling it from the calendar, okayed Kraven the Hunter making some questionable changes to its protagonist, approved a string of post-credits scenes that haven’t led to anything substantial, and effectively relies on Marvel Studios to prevent the studio from hitting the self-destruct button on Spider-Man for a third time.