We're going to look back at 2024 and think of it as a strange year for superhero movies. The two big dogs – Marvel Studios and DC Films – largely circled their wagons and prepared for a rebirth, which looks to begin in 2025 with the arrival of "Superman" for James Gunn and "The Fantastic Four: First Steps" for Kevin Feige and his team. The lack of overall comic-book competition helps explain why last summer’s "Deadpool and Wolverine" outperformed recent Marvel releases. At the same time, Sony Pictures stayed very busy in 2024 adding to its unusual universe of Spider-Man adjacent films, though the final entry might have concluded that experiment with a whimper, instead of a bang.
As Sony Pictures Chief Executive Officer Tony Vinciquerra prepared to step down from his post on January 2, he spoke with the L.A. Times about his tenure, and opened up about the performances of and reception for the Sony movies "Madame Web," "Venom," and December’s release "Kraven the Hunter." But the more we thought about the comments made by Vinciquerra the more it bothered us because it seems to have missed the point of the failed Sony Spider-Man universe, and dooms the future of a franchise that we still feel has so much potential, if handled correctly.
