With the release of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, Sony has cemented a film series that perhaps represents a crown jewel of quality for the studio. But it’s strange to think that the same company behind the awe-inspiring film, which garnered roaring applause and cheers from the audience at its conclusion when I watched the movie in a theater on a bargain night, could also put out a film like last year’s flop, Morbius.
Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is the name the corporate big-wigs would no doubt want you to call the cinematic franchise that includes the likes of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (at least, tangentially), the Venom films, the aforementioned Morbius, and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter movie. For my money, this represents a microcosm of everything that can go right with a comic book movie and everything that can go wrong with a comic book movie, depending on the movie you are looking at.
A complicated cinematic web
One point of clarification is that there’s truly a multiverse of different cinematic worlds that overlap with each other when it comes to Sony’s Marvel properties. For instance, 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home takes place in Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe, but that movie is actually a co-production with Disney and Sony. That means that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man doesn’t necessarily operate in the same world as Tom Hardy’s Venom, but because of the multiverse mythology in these films, the two characters are indeed connected. The same could be argued for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and its sequel; Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales in those films operates in a world that is separate from Tom Hardy’s Venom or Jared Leto’s Morbius. But again, because of the multiverse plot, Miles Morales is still connected to those live-action characters. As a testament to this interconnected web, characters from Tom Hardy’s Venom world cameo in Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, and Tom Hardy himself cameoed in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Truthfully, I did not watch last year’s Morbius, so I technically can’t give an opinion about the movie. But the film had such a low reception with critics and bombed so hard with audiences that it has since become a meme. But with that said, I did see the Venom movies. While I found the first Venom movie to be mid-acceptable at best, my patience was tested to the limit and then broken with the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage. This film was so mindless, so 2003, that it practically enraged me to sit through the whole thing. I found myself buying a movie ticket for the sole purpose of seeing the post-credit scene that was rumored to tease the setup for Spider-Man: No Way Home. I can say with absolute certainty that Let There Be Carnage represents, to me, an absolute low point in the idea of comic book cinematic universes.
Spider-Verse a leap forward in visual storytelling
But on the other hand, my experience watching Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse was the complete opposite; the combined strength of the animated spectacle’s visuals, characters, intrigue, action, heart, humor, and general storytelling made for an ethereal, near out-of-body experience. Indeed, the work that producers Christopher Miller and Phil Lord have created with this film represents, to me, as great of a visual technical achievement, or even better, than that of Avatar: The Way of Water.
Especially for the scenes involving the origin of Hailee Steinfeld’s Spider-Gwen, I found her universe to be stylistically transcendent in every way. Her universe has this melty, watercolor, pastel look to it, whereby every shot changes in its composition and coloring to match each moment’s emotional tone. The combination of this visual impact with the depth of my investment in the characters was comparable in my mind to the way I got practically choked up at the sheer visual beauty of James Cameron’s computer-animated sequel when I saw it in theaters earlier this year. Both movies generated a chill down my spine that I won’t soon forget, albeit for different reasons.
Indeed, it is not difficult to see the influence that 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse has already had on cinema. Look at films like last year’s highly acclaimed Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, and the trailer for the upcoming Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and it is obvious to see that these animated films coming out today owe a great deal of debt to what Spider-Verse created. No longer is there a hard barrier separating computer-animated films from 2D-animated films. Instead, what the Miles Morales movies have introduced is a beautiful blending of the two, with 3D models being endowed with paint-like textures and 2D animation techniques in a way that has never been seen before.
Is superhero fatigue a myth?
The stark juxtaposition that exists between the Spider-Verse films and the cringey awfulness found in movies like Let There Be Carnage and (presumably) Morbius illustrates that comic book movie fatigue, in general, may be a misnomer after all. As pointed out by James Gunn, who recently rated Into the Spider-Verse as his favorite comic book movie of all time, movie audiences nowadays are, arguably, not necessarily experiencing comic book movie fatigue, but mediocrity fatigue. As he told Rolling Stone:
“It doesn’t have anything to do with whether they’re superhero movies or not. If you don’t have a story at the base of it, just watching things bash each other, no matter how clever those bashing moments are, no matter how clever the designs and the VFX are, it just gets fatiguing, and I think that’s very, very real.”
So just what is the fundamental difference between Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Venom: Let There Be Carnage, anyway? I would argue it comes down to one film having a fleshed-out character who I care about, and another film lacking that, and instead only providing spectacle, and not much else. It sounds insane to declare that the superior character development is found in Across the Spider-Verse, a movie in which audiences were bombarded with perhaps thousands of variations of Spider-People engaging in a grand chase in a futuristic facility known as the Spider Society, but that’s just the way it is. It just goes to show that once a story’s fundamentals are in place, one’s own imagination is the only limit from there.
All of this is to ask, are Sony’s future SSU projects, such as Kraven the Hunter and Madame Web, doomed to inhabit the same dustbin of mediocrity in which Morbius and Let There Be Carnage reside? Not necessarily. But these films really need to nail storytelling fundamentals to succeed. If they don’t, audiences may once again feel that they’ve paid the price of a movie ticket for a mere end-credit scene as the only valuable takeaway, and such a model is not sustainable.