Sony Spider-Verse discussion thread

[Gaith]

Last I checked, there's no law against a bad movie.
So, perhaps we need to lobby for such a law.

This matter is of too great importance for laws and their lawyers. An ad hoc tribunal would be more appropriate; can we see if De Lancie's judge robes from Farpoint/All Good Things are available?

 

[Mr. Adventure]

The movie is full of Pepsi product placement and ends with

Spoiler: You couldn't make it up.

the villain being killed by a giant Pepsi sign.

It's just bad.

I was trying to find a picture of the giant JVC sign from Highlander Endgame but I guess they've scrubbed it upon release to home video. I remember it being ridiculous.

 

[wayoung]

I was trying to find a picture of the giant JVC sign from Highlander Endgame but I guess they've scrubbed it upon release to home video. I remember it being ridiculous.

Now see, that's a totally different situation.

JVC didn't pay for product placement, and actively didn't want the sign in the film, which is why it's slightly blurry - the producers lip service to masking it. It just happened to be in the background of where they were shooting the movie when they showed up, and they didn't have the money to change location or get rid of it.

 

[Tosk]

Now see, that's a totally different situation.

JVC didn't pay for product placement, and actively didn't want the sign in the film, which is why it's slightly blurry - the producers lip service to masking it. It just happened to be in the background of where they were shooting the movie when they showed up, and they didn't have the money to change location or get rid of it.

I've always thought that version of the story was baloney. The sign is facing inwards on a rooftop. Who would put a sign there? It doesn't actually advertise to anyone. My theory is a product placement deal that went sour.

Not to mention, a big glowing sign doesn't just "happen to be in the background" of almost every shot of a big fight scene. It's intentional.

 

[wayoung]

I've always thought that version of the story was baloney. The sign is facing inwards on a rooftop. Who would put a sign there? It doesn't actually advertise to anyone. My theory is a product placement deal that went sour.

Not to mention, a big glowing sign doesn't just "happen to be in the background" of almost every shot of a big fight scene. It's intentional.

It's a billboard on a building. The fight scene is on top of a smaller building. They showed up to shoot and there was a big sign there. They couldn't afford to scrap the shoot and find a new location. I don't know why that seems hard to believe, Endgame wasn't using Marvel money.

Nor are ads like that uncommon, every time I'm in a city I see billboards in buildings all over. If it was intentional they wouldn't have been forced by JVC to mask it some in home video releases.

 

[Tosk]

If it was intentional they wouldn't have been forced by JVC to mask it some in home video releases.

Which is why I said that I think it was a placement deal that went sour. That kind of thing happens sometimes. (Similar to the Coke poster in Grease that they had to blur out when they made a deal with Pepsi instead.)

They couldn't afford to scrap the shoot and find a new location.

If that were the case (and to be clear, I'm not disputing a restricted budget) that doesn't mean they would have to shoot with the ad in so many shots. If they got to the location and somehow there was a brand new sign there and they couldn't reschedule, they could have shot from a different angle so that the sign isn't prominently behind Duncan for so much of the scene. They chose to put it in frame directly behind Duncan for almost every shot of his Quickening. Plus, they didn't just show up to start shooting without any set-up. They scouted the location, and they also had to set-dress the rooftop. It's covered in stuff that they themselves added (so that they could knock stuff over, shoot sparks, explosions, etc) ...If the sign was truly unwanted during the shoot, they could have obscured it.

Nor are ads like that uncommon, every time I'm in a city I see billboards in buildings all over.

Have you ever seen a small billboard that is in the middle of the roof and faces inwards instead of outwards?

 

[Rich Watson]

Got to admit I wasn't expecting to watch people getting into an argument about fricking Highlander Endgame in 2024. (And thanks for making me feel old by reminding me that movie came out nearly 25 years ago.)

 

[Tosk]

Discussion, not argument.

 

[Skipper]

One of my favorite reviewers (James Berardinelli) summed up the problem with all Sony Spider-Verse films where the protagonist isn't Spider-Man: bad writing.

I know it's a simplistic reduction, but it's fascinating to try to understand why the best Spider-Verse films fail to reach the average quality of the MCU films. And it's not simply a "fidelity to the source material" issue: a movie can replicate a comic book panel for panel and still be a bad movie. Or stray far from its origins (Guardians of The Galaxy) and be a great film. Is it always the fault of the famous "studio interference"? Or they just can't find any decent screenwriters around (I honestly doubt). Or are these films increasingly a kind of monster created on an assembly line controlled by a thousand different interests without anyone supervising the final product?

 

[Grendelsbayne]

One of my favorite reviewers (James Berardinelli) summed up the problem with all Sony Spider-Verse films where the protagonist isn't Spider-Man: bad writing.

I know it's a simplistic reduction, but it's fascinating to try to understand why the best Spider-Verse films fail to reach the average quality of the MCU films. And it's not simply a "fidelity to the source material" issue: a movie can replicate a comic book panel for panel and still be a bad movie. Or stray far from its origins (Guardians of The Galaxy) and be a great film. Is it always the fault of the famous "studio interference"? Or they just can't find any decent screenwriters around (I honestly doubt). Or are these films increasingly a kind of monster created on an assembly line controlled by a thousand different interests without anyone supervising the final product?

Sony isn't trying to make good movies.

They're trying to make 'so bad it's good' movies, like Venom. (And they're trying to do it as cheaply as they can, too.) They just don't have the slightest idea how to do that deliberately instead of lucking into Tom Hardy's Venom performance. (Most likely because it, imo, really isn't possible to do that deliberately anyway.)

The writers who are credited on MW also created and wrote the fantastic Lost in Space reboot. If this movie is really that badly written, then it's probably because they wrote what Sony wanted them to write or because the script was largely replaced by rewrites from other writers writing what Sony wanted them to write.

 

[Skipper]

Sony isn't trying to make good movies.

They're trying to make 'so bad it's good' movies, like Venom. (And they're trying to do it as cheaply as they can, too.) They just don't have the slightest idea how to do that deliberately instead of lucking into Tom Hardy's Venom performance. (Most likely because it, imo, really isn't possible to do that deliberately anyway.)

On this point I've my doubts. I don't think any studio have ever said "Let's try to do this movie as bad as possible". Of course sometimes there are factors that makes a movie a "bad one", but I'm sure it's not the plan from the start (of course I'm talking about mainstream movies, not some tax scam like Use Boll's).

And I don't think it's even a good strategy. The movies that "are so bad they're good" usually when they are released are commercial failures and after that they aquire some cult status. And I don't believe that Sony's plans are making Madame web a favourite during drunk college parties in 20 years.

 

[Rich Watson]

They're definitely doing it on the cheap. Eighty million is a hell of a lot to you or me, but to make a movie with five superpowerd characters, not so much.

Which is part of why if you've seen the trailer you've seen most of the in-costume action that's in the movie.

 

[Christopher]

Or they just can't find any decent screenwriters around (I honestly doubt).

There are no doubt plenty of good screenwriters, but as I've been saying, they have no power in the feature industry. A typical film may hire up to a dozen or so writers, mostly uncredited; have each individual or team write a different script; then cut and paste together the bits of multiple scripts that the director and producers liked; then have maybe a different writer tie the fragments together into a more or less coherent script, which is constantly rewritten during production at the whim of the director, producers, actors, etc., and then gets further transformed in editing and reshoots. A single writer, even a credited one, has no more quality control over the process than a single assembly line worker in a factory.

The problem with the feature industry is that directors have all the power and many directors don't know what good writing is, while assuming they do. I read once that the problem is with the film school culture that produced a lot of modern directors, which stresses visuals and style and technique but doesn't stress the basics of writing and storytelling. A lot of modern directors built their careers on music videos and commercials, so long-form storytelling wasn't one of the basics they learned. Which is why there are so many stylish, gorgeous-looking, well-acted and well-made movies whose stories are incoherent garbage.

Of course, you're probably right that the fundamental problem is the studio's attitude. Even with all the strikes against writers, there are still good, well-written films out there, when the studios and filmmakers are willing to put care into that process. But it seems like the people in charge of the Sony Marvel Universe (or whatever its current name is) are just trying to churn out IP that they expect will automatically sell tickets because it's Marvel. Or else they're just trying to hold onto that lucrative IP by keeping it in production, the same thing that motivated them to keep rebooting Spider-Man and Fox to keep making X-Men movies. (For an example of this principle taken to its pettiest extreme: https://www.facebook.com/ryanestradadotcom/posts/10167532089040486 )

Which is part of why if you've seen the trailer you've seen most of the in-costume action that's in the movie.

The sad thing is, those are actually decent-looking superhero costumes.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

On this point I've my doubts. I don't think any studio have ever said "Let's try to do this movie as bad as possible". Of course sometimes there are factors that makes a movie a "bad one", but I'm sure it's not the plan from the start (of course I'm talking about mainstream movies, not some tax scam like Use Boll's).

And I don't think it's even a good strategy. The movies that "are so bad they're good" usually when they are released are commercial failures and after that they aquire some cult status. And I don't believe that Sony's plans are making Madame web a favourite during drunk college parties in 20 years.

I think they were trying to make a good movie when they originally started on Venom. It's pretty clear a number of the people making it figured out it wasn't a good movie while they were still making it and then leaned into that pretty hard. And since that movie made a ridiculous amount of money, Sony has now made 4 more movies that are very deliberately trying to copy the success of that one by being as much like it as they can.

The problem is Sony has no clue why Venom succeeded and thinks that there's some massive untapped market for so bad it's good superhero movies when really it's just that Venom is a big name character and Tom Hardy's performance struck a chord with people comedically, two things that Morbius, Madame Web and Kraven (probably) fundamentally don't have. Which is not to say that movies starring these characters couldn't succeed, but they definitely can't succeed by trying to ape Venom.

 

[Skipper]

The problem is Sony has no clue why Venom succeeded and thinks that there's some massive untapped market for so bad it's good superhero movies when really it's just that Venom is a big name character

I don't know about this. It is often overestimated how much non-comic readers know about comic book characters (apart from the usual Superman, Batman, Spider-Man etc). I know this is completely anecdotal, but when I went to see Iron Man I was the only one who knew who he was. The others had come because the trailer was interesting and/or the word of mouth was positive. How did those who don't read comics know about Venom before the movie? For some appearance in some old cartoon?

 

[Grendelsbayne]

I don't know about this. It is often overestimated how much non-comic readers know about comic book characters (apart from the usual Superman, Batman, Spider-Man etc). I know this is completely anecdotal, but when I went to see Iron Man I was the only one who knew who he was. The others had come because the trailer was interesting and/or the word of mouth was positive. How did those who don't read comics know about Venom before the movie? For some appearance in some old cartoon?

You're right, to an extent. But Venom is Spider-man's Joker (or his Bane if one thinks of the Goblin as his Joker), and Spider-man is the number 1 superhero on the planet.

People knew Venom from a number of old cartoons, an old movie and about a million different games, including not only games that were aimed entirely at comics fans.

ETA: And that's not even to say they were all huge fans of Venom and knew everything about him, either. But for a lot of people just hearing 'This is a movie about one of Spider-man's biggest enemies' would've been enough to generate interest. And the Hardy performance would've carried things from there.

 

[Guy Gardener]

They're definitely doing it on the cheap. Eighty million is a hell of a lot to you or me, but to make a movie with five superpowerd characters, not so much.

Which is part of why if you've seen the trailer you've seen most of the in-costume action that's in the movie.

Spoiler

The villain Ezekiel dreams his death constantly. After the invention of facial recognition software, he's able to track down the powerless teen girls in the present before they grow up into super human women in the future who kill him. So we just see snips from his dream over and over again where the Spider-Woman, Arachne and Silk kill him, but the bulk of the movie is just 3 useless winy 14 year olds, squealing and running in bad alternate timelines where Web gets them killed.

 

[Samurai8472]

Apparently this has only made $6 million on opening day

https://twitter.com/HollywoodHandle/status/1758159612224889090

Their budget was 80 million. So they might even break even when things settle down

Which actually might be something that Sony stumbled upon that's letting things be not-as-bad for them with other studios: relatively low budgets. That even when the movie isn't that successful, it's not that big of a hit to the finances for them.

Morbius actually had a similar budget to Madame Web. And while yes, it underperformed, it only lost about $20-$40 million...which in the realm of blockbuster movies, isn't that big of a loss. If anything, Black Adam that year was the bigger loser then Morbius, losing way more money (in the hundreds of millions)

 

[Christopher]

How did those who don't read comics know about Venom before the movie? For some appearance in some old cartoon?

Quite possibly, and that "old cartoon" was probably at least as influential as the comics. The version of the alien costume/Venom story from the '90s animated series was much more cohesive than the one in the comics, and introduced the idea that that symbiote made Peter psychologically darker and less inhibited, rather than merely draining his energy. I was surprised when I finally read Venom's origin in the comics and saw how bad it was in comparison to the animated adaptation, with Eddie Brock introduced out of nowhere and clumsily retconned into the backstory through extended infodump flashbacks, as opposed to the way the animated series introduced Brock at the start and organically built up his resentment toward Peter and Spidey. That's no doubt why most subsequent screen adaptations, including the Raimi movies and the later animated series, have tended to emulate the '90s series's version of the symbiote/Venom story.

 

[Mr. Adventure]

Venom might be known to audiences in a whole different way than movies and comics.
https://gamerant.com/venom-video-game-appearances-spider-man-marvel-vs-capcom/

I haven't played them yet and they're supposed to be pretty good but I think he's in the most recent Playstation games as well which were massive hits.