Sony Pictures is looking to spin a new web with Spider-Man characters.
The studio’s CEO, Tom Rothman, confirmed in a recent interview that Sony plans to reboot its interconnected universe of wall-crawling Marvel characters in the unspecified future.
On the latest episode of Matthew Belloni’s The Town podcast, the journalist asked Rothman, “Where are we in the Spider-Man franchise? Not the animated Spider-Verse. Is the larger Spider-Verse dead?”
Rothman responded, “No.”
Belloni then asked, “Are you going to go back to those at some point?”, to which Rothman responded, “Yes.”
Belloni also asked if the new iteration of the universe would be a “fresh reboot” with “new people.”
Rothman confirmed both ideas, acknowledging that the next wave of Sony-Marvel movies will feature fresh faces.
Courtesy Sony Pictures
Later in the conversation, Rothman discussed the declining box office returns for superhero movies after Belloni asked about his thoughts on Disney’s Marvel Cinematic Universe.
“To your question about Spider-Man: Scarcity has value,” Rothman opined. “You’ve got to make the audience miss you. It’s the old thing. I always had trouble getting girls to go out with me twice, but until fortunately, my wife took pity on me, but absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
Sony has held the rights to theatrical Spider-Man projects since 1999, and produced Sam Raimi‘s trilogy of hits starring Tobey Maguire as the central web-slinger in the 2000s. After a pair of somewhat disappointing reboot films starring Andrew Garfield in the early 2010s, the studio teamed up with Marvel Studios to bring Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe with Spider-Man: Homecoming in 2017, featuring Tom Holland in the lead role. A year later, Sony launched its first Spider-Man spinoff movie, Venom.
Since 2018, the studio has released six live-action Marvel movies based on secondary Spider-Man characters: Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius, Madame Web, Venom: The Last Dance, and Kraven the Hunter. None of these movies actually featured Spider-Man, and all of them received negative reviews from critics, without a single “fresh” Rotten Tomatoes score among them.
And, in direct contrast to Rothman’s point about scarcity, Sony’s last three Marvel movies all bowed in 2024, meaning the studio’s comic book movie output outpaced both DC (which only released Joker: Folie a Deux that year) and Marvel Studios (which only released Deadpool & Wolverine).
While the implications of Rothman’s comments aren’t completely clear, it seems safe to assume that viewers won’t see Tom Hardy as Venom, Dakota Johnson as Madame Web, Jared Leto as Morbius, or Aaron Taylor-Johnson as Kraven the Hunter in a new wave of films. (But this is the same studio that brought three Spider-Man universes together in No Way Home, so anything is possible!)
Matt Kennedy/MARVEL
Sony’s next theatrical Spider-Man project is the Destin Daniel Cretton-directed Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which will see Holland’s Peter Parker cross paths with Mark Ruffalo’s Hulk and Jon Bernthal’s Punisher. The film is set to release July 31.
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Sony is also joining forces with Amazon MGM to put forth its first live-action Spider-Man TV series, Spider-Noir. The show will star Nicolas Cage as a gumshoe version of Spider-Man in an alternate 1930s New York City. Cage previously played an iteration of the character in the 2018 animated hit Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, though it remains to be seen whether or how Spider-Noir might connect to Sony’s other Spidey projects.