Arriving just 10 months after the disastrous Madame Web, Sony Pictures’ Kraven the Hunter landed in theaters in December with a resounding critical and commercial thud. Kraven’s failure to draw in fans of Spider-Man’s most famous villains helped underscore a simple fact: Apart from Venom, audiences simply don’t care about Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, known internally at the company as Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters.
That isn’t for lack of effort on Sony’s part. Over the course of six live-action films — half of them starring Tom Hardy’s gooey antihero Venom — the studio tried to carve out a Marvel Cinematic Universe of its own, putting Spider-Man villains and side characters in the spotlight while removing Spider-Man from their lives as an adversary and raison d’être.
Sony’s ambitions for its Spider-Man Universe Without Spider-Man were immense, judging from the many planned movies the studio claimed at various points were underway. But those promises were often met with ambivalence or confusion from Marvel Comics fans. In addition to the six films the studio did manage to spew forth, at least another six reached some stage of development, luring in talent like Donald Glover, The Cabin in the Woods director Drew Goddard, and Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (aka Bad Bunny). Many of Sony’s projects stalled or were rethought, as Morbius and Madame Web both drew mockery and tanked at the box office.
While this chapter of the Sony Spider-Man Universe appears to be coming to a close, according to a report from The Wrap, here’s a reminder of what could have been, had good taste not prevailed.
Image: Sony Pictures
Back in 2013, Sony teed up a big expansion of its Spider-Man universe, which the studio teased in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. In addition to two more Amazing Spider-Man sequels starring Andrew Garfield, Sony had designs on a spinoff focused on supervillain team the Sinister Six, which would have focused on longtime Spider-Man enemies like Mysterio, Electro, Doctor Octopus, Vulture, Rhino, and Sandman — or some such combination of Marvel bad guys and gals. Drew Goddard (Cloverfield, Lost) was attached to write and direct the film, which he floated as a two-parter.
But after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed at the box office (it still made, like, $700 million), Sony altered its plans, inking a deal with Marvel Studios in 2015 to lend Spider-Man to the core Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Producer Amy Pascal said as recently as 2018 that she’s still up for a Sinister Six movie, with Goddard’s involvement. But given Sony’s SSU fortunes, and the fact that Spider-Man: No Way Home already kind of did the thing, it’s probably not happening.
Image: Inhyuk Lee/Marvel
Spider-Man side characters (and occasional antagonists) Silver Sable and Black Cat were once tipped for their own feature team-up known as Silver and Black. Silver Sable, a mercenary hunter of war criminals, and Black Cat, a Spidey romantic foil with bad-luck powers, would have been the stars of the film, which was at one point slated for a February 2019 release.
Director Gina Prince-Bythewood (The Woman King) was attached to helm the movie, which was eventually halted as Sony planned to split it into two films, one for each character. In 2020, Silver and Black was reportedly being reimagined as a television series, with Prince-Bythewood still attached.
Felicity Jones portrayed Felicia Hardy, Black Cat’s alter ego, in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but it’s unclear whether she was ever expected to appear in Silver and Black.
Musician turned actor Bad Bunny was once set to star in El Muerto, a Spider-Man-adjacent movie about a wrestler who gains super-strength from his mystical luchador mask. Announced at CinemaCon in 2022, with a planned release in 2024, El Muerto was set to be directed by Jonás Cuarón and written by Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer.
Bad Bunny revealed in a 2023 Vanity Fair profile that he was no longer involved in El Muerto, and Sony was later reported to be interested in continuing on without him. That was before the double bombs of Madame Web and Kraven, however. El Muerto is no longer on Sony’s release schedule.
Donald Glover once said “Yeah, sure” to a stand-alone picture about Hypno-Hustler, the musical Spider-Man villain and lead singer of disco group The Mercy Killers, a band that would hypnotize and rob its audiences. Hypno-Hustler has only appeared in a handful of Marvel comics, so the idea of a feature film based on the supervillain seemed like one of Sony’s oddest swerves. Glover may be too busy with the long-awaited, long-delayed Community movie and that Lando Calrissian Star Wars spinoff to ever bring Hypno-Hustler to the big screen, though.
Image: E Ejikure/Marvel
In 2020, Deadline reported that comics writer Marc Guggenheim was tackling the script for Jackpot, a movie about… well, we’re not sure what it would have been about, because there have been at least three superheroines named Jackpot in Marvel’s comics. The first, Sara Ehret, was a scientist and mother who accidentally had her DNA rewritten, earning her superhuman strength. The second, Alana Jobson, was a wannabe crimefighter who bought the Jackpot identity from Ehret and used mutant growth hormone to gain superpowers. The third Jackpot? None other than Peter Parker’s longtime love interest Mary Jane Watson.
Nightwatch is Marvel’s Spider-Man-adjacent, Ph.D. turned superhero who gets his powers from a high-tech battle suit lifted from his deceased future self — comic books, folks! He looks uncomfortably like Spawn, and was at one point relatively close to having a major motion picture directed by Spike Lee. We haven’t heard much about a Nightwatch movie since Variety reported on it in 2018.
Image: Inhyuk Lee/Marvel
Sony at one point conceived a movie about Silk (aka Cindy Moon), a Korean American superheroine who was bitten by the same radioactive spider that gave Peter Parker his Spider-Man powers. But that project reportedly evolved into a TV series, Silk: Spider Society, for Amazon’s Prime Video service before fizzling out.
Cindy Moon has since made it to the big screen; Tiffany Espensen played the character, Peter Parker’s classmate, in Spider-Man: Homecoming and Avengers: Infinity War.
Beyond its released and scrapped projects, Sony has reportedly toyed with much more, including movies based on Spider-Woman, Mysterio, and even Aunt May. For now, Sony appears to be moving forward with what has worked so far for the studio. Still-active projects include a third Spider-Verse film (deep into production, but currently undated and possibly not coming until 2027), another team-up with Marvel Studios for a fourth Spider-Man movie starring Tom Holland (scheduled for 2026), and the SSU television series Spider-Noir (currently in production and expected in 2025) featuring Nicolas Cage reprising his role from Into the Spider-Verse.
