Sony just posted the biggest opening weekend in the history of the movies, and in the same week the man who runs the place quietly buried an entire universe. Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures’ Motion Picture Group, was asked by Variety whether there are more Spider-Man spin-offs coming. His answer did not leave much room to squint at. “Right now, we don’t know,” he said. “We never looked at it as the ‘Sony-Marvel Universe.’ We looked at if there were worthwhile movies to make with other characters. At the moment, there are none in active development.” On why the ones they did make landed the way they landed, he was even blunter: “Ultimately, the audience wasn’t satisfied enough with them. Whether that’s a fair assessment of those movies, who knows.”
Read that second quote again, because there is a small, very human bit of grievance tucked into the end of it. “Whether that’s a fair assessment of those movies, who knows” is not the sentence of an executive who agrees with the verdict. It is the sentence of a man who has read the reviews, seen the grosses, accepted the outcome and still thinks the jury got it slightly wrong. We have some sympathy. Not much. But some.
Sony just posted the biggest opening weekend in the history of the movies, and in the same week the man who runs the place quietly buried an entire universe.”
This is a real shift, not a shrug. As recently as February, Rothman was talking about rebooting that corner of the slate with fresh talent, which at the time read as Sony regrouping rather than retreating. “None in active development” is a different sentence entirely. There is no secret project, no quiet reset, no writer in a room somewhere fixing Madame Web. The lights are off. And the ledger explains why. The Venom trilogy was the only part of this experiment that ever actually worked, and it worked enormously: the first film took $856 million worldwide, “Let There Be Carnage” took just over $500 million, and “The Last Dance” closed the run somewhere around $475 million. That is more than $1.8 billion from three movies most critics could not stand, which is its own kind of argument about who was right.
Everything else was carnage of the non-symbiote variety. “Morbius” made $167 million and turned into a meme so total that Sony rereleased it on the strength of the joke and watched it make almost nothing. “Madame Web” landed at roughly $100 million against an $80 million budget, which in blockbuster math is a loss with extra steps. “Kraven the Hunter” is the one that actually ended this, opening to $11 million, the worst start of any Sony-produced Marvel film, and finishing near $62 million against a budget north of $110 million. Three swings, three misses, and the last one hard enough to close the batting cage. Now hold all of that next to what Sony released four weeks ago, because the two facts belong in the same conversation and almost nobody is putting them there.
“Spider-Man: Brand New Day” opened to $168 million on its first Friday, which is the biggest single day any movie has ever had in North America. Sunday estimates put the three-day at $355 million, already the second-largest opening weekend ever recorded. Then the actuals came in on Monday and pushed it to roughly $360 million, which moved it past “Avengers: Endgame” and its $357 million to the top of the all-time domestic list. Seven years that record stood. A Spider-Man movie took it in a weekend.
Globally it was nearly as absurd. The worldwide debut landed around $930 million, the second-biggest opening in film history and behind only Endgame’s $1.22 billion, which remains the one number in this business that nobody can seem to touch. India alone delivered $31.8 million, the largest opening weekend a Hollywood release has ever had in that market. It is the biggest opening in Sony Pictures’ history by a distance, and the film is tracking toward becoming 2026’s fourth billion-dollar release, joining “Toy Story 5,” “Michael” and “The Super Mario Galaxy Movie.”
So let us please stop pretending the last few years have been about superhero fatigue. The audience is not tired. The audience is selective, and it has been selective this entire time, and the industry has spent three years mistaking one for the other because “fatigue” is a much more comfortable thing to tell a boardroom than “people did not want the movie you made.” A genre does not simultaneously produce the worst opening in a studio’s Marvel history and the biggest opening in the history of the medium. Those two results came out of the same building, from the same characters, inside eighteen months of each other.
What actually separated them is not complicated. Brand New Day had a character people had spent a decade caring about, a story that continued something they were already invested in, and a reason to exist beyond a rights expiration. Kraven and Madame Web were built the other way around: start with an asset, reverse-engineer a movie, hope the Spider-Man logo does the emotional labor of a Spider-Man. It never did, because he was never in them. That was always the structural joke at the center of the Sony Spider-Man Universe, and audiences worked it out considerably faster than the studio did. Nothing has damaged the wider superhero space more than being asked to keep track of a continuity that hands you homework instead of a story, and the ChronoCut instinct that makes fans want to map these universes end to end only survives if the map is actually worth walking.
Rothman’s own framing supports this, for what it is worth. “We never looked at it as the ‘Sony-Marvel Universe'” is a bit of retroactive tidying given how hard the marketing leaned on exactly that idea, but the second half is honest: they were looking for worthwhile movies to make with other characters, and they have concluded there are not any right now. Given the results, that is the correct conclusion, arrived at roughly two films later than it should have been.
What survives is the part that was always going to survive. Rothman said he hopes Tom Holland returns for a fifth film, which is the least surprising sentence any studio head has spoken this year given the receipts sitting on his desk. Sony’s Spider-Man business is now what it was before somebody drew a universe chart on a whiteboard: one guy, in the suit, in movies people actually want. Everything else was a decade-long, roughly billion-dollar detour to prove that Venom was a fluke and the audience was paying closer attention than anyone gave it credit for.
What Do You Think? Was the Sony Spider-Man Universe ever actually salvageable, or was a villain franchise without its hero doomed from the first pitch meeting no matter who they cast? Does Brand New Day’s record weekend prove superhero fatigue was always a myth the industry told itself, or just that Spider-Man specifically is bulletproof while everyone else is not? And now that Rothman has said the spin-offs are dead, does Venom stay dead too, or is that the one door Sony reopens the second it needs a fourth-quarter release?
See you on the next binge!
