In a refreshingly honest appearance on The Town, which aired on February 24, Sony Pictures CEO Tom Rothman confirmed what many industry insiders believed: Sony is planning a complete reboot of their live-action Spider-Man spin-off universe.
Speaking to journalist Matt Belloni, Rothman confessed, “Yes, you will [go back to those at some point]. But it’ll be a fresh reboot. New people. Okay. Yes…” Essentially, it seems that Sony is abandoning their attempt to build a universe featuring Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter, among others.
Tom Rothman confirms Spider-Man villain universe reboot
While Rothman was unwilling to call any film a failure, industry insiders have pointed to Kraven the Hunter, which is believed to have lost Sony money, as the catalyst for this change. But, according to Rothman, it was simply a matter of too much of a good thing. He now believes in a philosophy of scarcity, where people need to miss a character before they’ll be willing to spend money to see them again.
This is a significant change in strategy from Sony, which set out to build a universe centered on Spider-Man villains, but without the wall-crawler at the center.
But perhaps most surprising was Rothman’s anecdote concerning Sony’s Spider-Man film, No Way Home. Apparently, Chinese censors wanted Sony to remove a scene featuring the Statue of Liberty from the film in order to get it approved for a mainland China release. But Rothman was unwilling to make that compromise. “I really didn’t look forward to sitting in there in front of Congress, telling them why I cut the Statue of Liberty out at the request of the CCP.” The film ultimately did not release in China, falling just short of the $2 billion global box office mark. He jokingly suggested that the next Spider-Man film might just avoid the Statue of Liberty altogether to avoid any further controversy.
In another lighthearted moment, Rothman talked about his time working on the X-Men franchise at Fox Studios, in which a “skinny little junior assistant” sometimes offered comments about comic book accuracy. The skinny little junior assistant was none other than Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige, the architect of the MCU.
Rothman joked that had he known the importance of Feige in the future of film, he would have been “much nicer.” Outside of superheroes, Rothman also talked about the real problem in the film industry: the loss of the mid-budget original film. He explained that people have been conditioned to wait for these films to come out on streaming services.
As an example of this, he mentioned James Cameron’s films that are experiential in nature and require people to go to the theater to see them. He also mentioned films that star A-list talent like Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Holland.
The reboot of Spider-Man villains is about more than just Spider-Man villains to Rothman; it’s about making people care about films again.
