A Culture Of No Accountability
The CEO of Sony attributed the failures of Madame Web, Morbius, and Kraven the Hunter to the film media's desire to see those movies fail. This speaks to a wider lack of accountability among the top brass at the major studios. Join Adam as he discusses the potential implications.
https://open.spotify.com/episode/7AU3QujVN5F9KNyvVyvDUq?si=sQXXtSxHScaLUXxbDDcMDg
Earlier today Variety ran an article where the CEO of Sony blamed critics for the failures of the Sony Universe of Marvel Characters (SUMC). His allegation was that the movies like Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter weren't bad but the press decided they "didn't want us making these films" and decided to just tell everyone they were bad before people made their own decisions. He cited the fact that Madame Web did well on Netflix as proof of the movie's success.
There are a few things to unpack here before getting to the main point. Number one, Netflix and Sony have a lucrative contract that involves Netflix heavily promoting the films they get exclusivity of so paying a lot for visibility and then saying "well a lot of people watched it there" is disingenuous at best. Number two, if the press had the power to kill a franchise with negative coverage, I wouldn't have had to sit through a good amount of the DCEU, we wouldn't be preparing for the twelfth Fast and the Furious movie, and I wouldn't have sat through Mufasa: The Lion King last week. Finally, the press didn't "decide" these movies were bad, the general failures of filmmaking and narrative storytelling dictated that these movies were bad.
That's not the point though. The point is that this statement serves two purposes. It is a man begging to keep his job by deflecting the blame for losing hundreds of millions of dollars off himself while also signaling to the industry that Sony is going to be headed into a period of austerity by focusing on less risky titles.
To the first point, the failures of Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter constitute massive sources of financial loss for Sony Pictures. We've also mentioned it before but Sony does not have many other franchises to fall back on when one starts to falter, especially when one of their others (Ghostbusters) also had a movie come out this year which also performed poorly. Considering the CEO's job is to generate value for shareholders, if over the course of multiple years they've shown systemic failures at generating that value, it may be time for a shift in leadership.
This deflection of blame for poor decision-making off the brass and onto the creatives is not something isolated to Sony. Disney did the same thing in the wake of the disappointment of Lightyear by placing the blame on the moment of LGBT representation, not on the fact that it was an origin story no one asked for besides the studio executives at the highest levels looking to capitalize on Toy Story 4's billion dollar gross. This extended to the removal of a storyline involving a transgender character in Win or Lose which legitimizes and emboldens right-wing culture warriors while also deflecting the blame to already marginalized groups.
What this signifies is that Sony is going to move into a period where they only develop and release movies in franchises they consider safe. They will not take risks with the IP, they will not take the risk of something new, and they likely will not bring the budgets down on these projects. It's a weird situation because clearly the "safe" option would have been to develop the other Spider-People into their own movies. Do a Cindy Moon movie, a Anya Corazon movie, a Miles Morales movie, work with Disney when you are negotiating the MCU appearance contract for a deal to do an Avengers 2099 movie with Miguel O'Hara leading since Marvel Studios is probably never going to do it. The possibilities are literally endless.
The risk-averse model that Sony should be adopting is the creator-first approach. Find writers and directors who have a character they are passionate about and give them a modest budget to tell the story they want to tell. All three of the cited movies have aspects of the narrative that work and could have been a passable if not good movie had it been the entire plot. At a certain point, Sony should be asking themselves why they won't work on a sub-$100 Million Silk, Black Cat, Silver Sable, or Spider-Gwen movie. If Sonic The Hedgehog 3 cost $112 million, they should definitely be able to do one of those, perhaps even for less.
Realistically all this means is that Tom Hardy will be playing Eddie Brock into his 80s (or until audiences get tired of it).
