We watch several movies a week. Every Friday, we'll talk a little about some of the movies we watched that we felt were Worth Mentioning.
VENOM: THE LAST DANCE (2024)
Sony holds the rights to make movies based on the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man and any characters that were introduced in the pages of Spider-Man comics. So while they’re currently sharing Spider-Man with Marvel Studios, allowing that character to play in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, they’ve also been making their own movies on the side that are based on supporting characters and villains. This attempt at a non-MCU franchise is called Sony’s Spider-Man Universe – and it hasn’t been very successful, aside from the movie based on the Venom character. Released in 2018, the first Venom film made $856 million at the global box office. The numbers dipped to $501 million for the 2021 follow-up Venom: Let There Be Carnage, but that was a solid amount for a movie released at that time when the world was just starting to emerge from the pandemic shutdown. Still, Sony made the unexpected decision to try to wrap up the Venom series as a trilogy, delivering the trilogy capper Venom: The Last Dance in 2024.
Kelly Marcel had worked on the screenplays for the previous two movies and was promoted to writer/director status on the third film, making her feature directorial debut. This is quite a large project for a first-timer, but Marcel did make something that is pretty much in line with what directors Ruben Fleischer and Andy Serkis did on the previous two movies. That’s not a great compliment, as I don’t think either of those movies were very good, but at least Marcel didn’t completely drop the ball.
Tom Hardy reprises the role of investigative reporter Eddie Brock, who is on the run from the law following the events of the previous film. Brock’s body is inhabited by a gooey alien symbiote called Venom, which coats his body to become a super-powered being whenever they need to fight villains or accomplish something the normal human body can’t do, like hang onto the side of a cross-country commercial airliner. Run out San Francisco, where he was living, Brock is trying to get to his former home of New York City, where he hopes to clear his name. But he and Venom have a bumpy ride on their road trip.
Long ago, the alien symbiotes turned on their creators, a god-like being called Knull, and imprisoned him. Seeking to escape his prison so he can annihilate all living planets and destroy his symbiote offspring, Knull realizes that the Brock/Venom combo is the “codex” that will release him, so he sends a monstrous creature called a Xenophage to track them down on Earth.
Meanwhile, the top secret military based Area 51 is being shut down – but beneath the surface, a new base called Area 55 has been assembled, and there a government operation called Imperium has been capturing and studying other alien symbiotes that have arrived on Earth. Researchers at Area 55 include Juno Temple as Dr. Theodora "Teddy" Paine, who has a completely unnecessary back story involving her ambitious brother being killed by a lightning strike, and Clark Backo as Sadie, a.k.a. "Christmas." This project is overseen by Chiwetel Ejiofor as General Rex Strickland, who sets out to add Venom to his symbiote collection.
The story Hardy and Marcel crafted for this film has the makings of an epic. There’s a symbiote-hunting military task force, monstrous creatures, a god-like being that wants to wipe out planets, and Venom caught in the middle. But these movies have always had an unexpectedly goofball tone, and this one is no different. Instead of playing up the world-destroying stakes, Marcel takes the time to show us things like Venom taking over the body of a horse, then a frog, then dancing to ABBA, and Brock hanging out with a family of hippies.
It all builds up to a symbiotes vs. Xenophages battle at Area 51 / 55, which is something along the lines of what fans expected to see in the first movie, which was based on source material that saw Venom doing battle with the symbiotes Scream, Phage, Lasher, Agony, and Riot. For the movie, they only had him fight Riot. Lasher, Phage, and Agony finally made it into Venom: The Last Dance, along with several other symbiotes. There’s a blue one, a white one, a two-headed hybrid, one that seems to have some kind of fire mixed into its body, another that may or may not have been meant to be Toxin... Unfortunately, the symbiotes’ battle with the Xenophages isn’t very thrilling, as it’s just a bunch of CGI slime splashing across the screen.
In the end, Venom: The Last Dance is underwhelming, just like its predecessors. It also had box office that wasn’t far off from Venom: Let There Be Carnage’s haul, as it pulled in $474 million. Numbers that didn’t look as good in 2024 as they did in 2021. So maybe Sony was right to end this series while they could still get some cash out of it.
Oddly, even though this was supposed to be the end, loose ends were left dangling, as the head of Imperium is never revealed and Knull is still out there.
MORBIUS (2022)
Doctor Michael Morbius, “the living vampire,” was introduced in the pages of The Amazing Spider-Man #101 back in 1971. Originally presented as a villain, he became a tragic anti-hero – and I became aware of him in the early ‘90s, when he got his own title and was part of the “Midnight Sons” group of supernatural heroes that also included the likes of Ghost Rider, Doctor Strange, and Blade. I was a big time Ghost Rider reader and collector at that time and would branch out to read the titles of characters connected to him, so I became very familiar with Morbius. When Sony announced that they were going to expand their Spider-Man Universe with a Morbius movie, a lot of Marvel fans questioned why they would do that – but since I knew and enjoyed that Morbius series from the early ‘90s (it ran from 1992 to 1995), I knew the character had the potential to carry his own story. It would just depend on the execution. And, unfortunately, the film director Daniel Espinosa and writers Matt Sazama and Burk Sharpless made out of the Morbius concept did not go over well with viewers, quickly becoming best known as a target for mocking memes.
Morbius really isn’t too bad of a movie... it’s just not a very interesting movie, either. Espinosa, Sazama, and Sharpless told this story in the most underwhelming way possible – and while there are some leaps in logic and in the storytelling along the way, I don’t know whether they were at fault for that, or if it was the result of studio meddling.
Anyway, the film lets us know that Michael Morbius was born with a rare blood disease that requires him to undergo blood transfusions three times a day. While in a hospital in Greece as a child, he met a boy named Lucien, who he nicknamed Milo, who also had the blood disease. Twenty-five years later, Milo (played by Matt Smith) has become rich through means that aren’t clear in the movie while Morbius (Jared Leto) has become a doctor and has dedicated his life to finding a cure to their disease. His endeavors led to the create of an artificial blood that he was offered (and declined) the Nobel Prize for, but he still hasn’t found a cure. Next on his list of possibilities is capturing vampire bats from Costa Rica and trying to splice their DNA with his. This experiment certainly improves his health, it even gives him super powers, but the downside is that he takes on a form of vampirism and has to regularly consume blood.
Morbius experiments on himself while on a ship in international waters and is instantly compelled to wipe out the mercenaries Milo hired to be the ship’s crew, so he knows there’s something off about his cure and refuses to give it to Milo. So Milo just takes it and turns himself into a rampaging, gleeful bloodsucker – which means Morbius is going to have to take him down by the end of the film.
Morbius is aided in his endeavors by his colleague / love interest Doctor Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona) and has to deal with a pair of FBI agents, Al Madrigal as Al Rodriguez and Tyrese Gibson as Simon Stroud, keeping an eye on him. At one point, Stroud mentions that Morbius’s artificial blood saved his arm when he was injured while serving in the military in Afghanistan – and that’s a reference that was apparently supposed to set up the fact that the character had bionic enhancements on one of his arms, which was glimpsed in the film’s trailer but cannot be seen in the finished film. Also cut out of the movie completely was a scene that Tyrese Gibson said involved Simon Stroud (and his proudly displayed bionic arm) having a brawl with Milo in a park. When things like that are missing from the movie, it’s no wonder the story seems to jump ahead at times.
Sometimes I cringe when I hear that Jared Leto has been cast in something, as I find something off-putting about him and some of his performances, but he did an okay job playing Morbius, even if he comes off surprisingly low-key and dull. Smith seemed to have plenty of fun playing Milo, even dancing his way through some scenes... but the climactic battle between Morbius and Milo is not very interesting.
Still, despite being questionable at times and underwhelming at best, Morbius is a fine movie... At least, it is until the end credits, where Sony dropped in two of the worst credits scenes ever conceived. For some reason, they bring Michael Keaton’s Vulture character from Spider-Man: Homecoming out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and into the Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, and as soon as the guy arrives in this different reality, he decides he wants to form a team with Morbius. It’s nonsensical, and it’s only in there because Sony has long been obsessed with the idea of making a Sinister Six movie that would be about six Spider-Man villains, they don’t seem to care which ones, teaming up and doing... something. Anything. They tried to rush into this concept back when they were making The Amazing Spider-Man 2, and they tried to bumble into it here, too.
MADAME WEB (2024)
It was always strange that Sony wanted to build a “universe” of films that were based on Spider-Man characters but wouldn’t feature Spider-Man, but as they started announcing the projects, some of them made some level of sense. For example, a proper Venom origin story should involve Spider-Man, but the character has carried his own titles and he’s quite popular, so the fact that they wanted to make a Venom movie was almost a no-brainer. Morbius the Living Vampire has carried his own titles, so he could carry a movie. It’s just a shame his movie wasn’t better. One of the bizarre announcements was when Sony said they were going to pair the mercenary character Silver Sable and the cat burglar Black Cat for a movie called Silver & Black, but I could still imagine that turning out to be a cool action movie in the right hands. (Sony ended up scrapping it.) And the strangest announcement of all was when the studio said they wanted to make a Madame Web movie.
Madame Web isn’t a popular character, and even comic readers who were familiar with her weren’t keen to see her get her own movie. She’s a clairvoyant who’s usually depicted as an elderly woman with the neuromuscular junction disease myasthenia gravis, connected to a life support system resembling a spiderweb. She couldn’t star in a movie on her own – so what writer/director S.J. Clarkson and co-writers Matt Sazama, Burk Sharpless, and Claire Parker did was make Madame Web not only an origin story for the title character, but also three other characters.
A lot of different characters have gone by the name Spider-Woman in Marvel Comics history and this movie features two of them, along with a version of a character known as Araña or Spider-Girl.
The story begins in 1973 Peru, with pregnant scientist Constance Webb (Kerry Bishé) searching the Amazon for a type of spider that is believed to have healing properties – and is even rumored to be responsible for a mythical tribe of “spider people” who live in the rainforest. When Constance successfully catches one of these spiders, her security guard Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim) shoots her and everyone else on site, stealing the spider for himself. Constance is rescued by the spider people tribe and bitten by one of the power-giving spiders, but still dies of the gunshot while giving birth to her daughter Cassandra.
Jump to 2003 and Cassandra (Dakota Johnson) is now working as an EMT in New York City alongside Ben Parker (Adam Scott), whose sister-in-law Mary (Emma Roberts) happens to be pregnant with the child that will someday become Spider-Man. After a near-death experience, Cassandra starts having visions of the future. Visions that draw her to a trio of teenage girls; Sydney Sweeney as Julia Cornwall, Celeste O’Connor as Mattie Franklin, and Isabela Merced as Anya Corazón. Two future Spider-Women and one future Spider-Girl. And while we see these girls in their superhero costumes in visions, this is not the story of them being superheroes. This is the story of them meeting each other as teens before someday becoming spider-powered heroines.
Ezekiel Sims is also in New York City, sporting spider powers of his own and having nightmarish visions that tell him these spider-women are going to murder him someday. So he intends to murder them first. His attempts to kill them just succeed in forcing them to come together under the protection of Cassandra.
Most of Madame Web takes place in 2003, and the movie actually feels like a relic from that time, when studios were trying to crack the code on comic book movies while still being embarrassed to be working with comic book source material. Sure, we got X-Men and Spider-Man out of those days, but we also got misfires like Elektra and Fantastic Four. Madame Web fits right in with the latter two… but it’s a lot worse than they were.
Everyone involved with this movie deserved much better than this. This project was a bad idea from the start and that bad idea made for an awkward, clunky, poorly written, cringe-inducing movie.
KRAVEN THE HUNTER (2024)
In the comics world, Kraven the Hunter is known as one of Spider-Man’s most formidable enemies. There’s even a storyline where Kraven manages to successfully shoot and apparently kill Spider-Man, burying him, stealing his costume, and taking his place on the streets of New York. (Thankfully, Spidey was only shot with a strong tranquilizer and crawls out of his grave after two weeks.) So he would have made a great villain for a Spider-Man movie at some point. It’s a shame his live-action screen debut was wasted on a solo movie that went over like a lead balloon.
Sony did appear to be aiming high with the Kraven the Hunter movie. They hired J. C. Chandor, who had multiple critically acclaimed films to his name, to direct from a screenplay by The Equalizer writer Richard Wenk and the duo of Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, known for Iron Man and Punisher: War Zone. But it seems that no matter what you’ve accomplished elsewhere in your career, it’s just impossible to make a good movie within “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.”
Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who was heavily rumored to be the next James Bond when this movie was making its way out into the world, stars as Sergei Kravinoff, the son of crime lord and hunting enthusiast Nikolai Kravinoff (Russell Crowe). When he was a teenager, Sergei was nearly killed by a lion during a hunt. Using a mysterious serum given to her by her Tarot-reading grandmother, a young woman named Calypso saved his life... and in doing so, gave him enhanced strength and agility with an animalistic edge. For sixteen years, Sergei has been using his abilities to take down criminals. His anti-crime mission takes a personal turn when his half-brother Dmitri (Fred Hechinger) is abducted by mercenaries led by Aleksei Sytsevich (Alessandro Nivola), who has undergone an experimental procedure that gives him the strength and appearance of a rhino. Aleksei is seeking to take down Nikolai and hires a mercenary called the Foreigner (Christopher Abbott) to take Sergei out of the equation.
You can tell that Chandor and his collaborators were really trying to deliver a prestigious, worth comic book adaptation with this film. A great cast was assembled, the story was taken seriously, there was an attempt to give it all an emotional weight. And it features a bunch of different Spider-Man villains and side characters: Kraven, Calypso (much nicer here than her comic book counterpart and played as an adult by Ariana DeBose), the Foreigner, the Rhino, Chameleon. The problem for me was that the movie was very dull for most of its running time. The teenage flashback takes up too much time, the “crime thriller” portions are not interesting, and when the movie really leans into the comic book elements, the stuff comes off as cheesy. The presentation of the Rhino, in particular, is atrocious. The way Sergei’s vigilante crusade is presented also doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.
Taylor-Johnson was clearly doing his best to make Kraven a cool, badass lead character, but the movie around him just doesn’t work very well. For me, this was a 127 minute slog to get through.
While the Venom movies did well at the box office, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were all box office disappointments. Following this string of failures, Sony Pictures CEO Tony Vinciquerra said they were going to step back and re-evaluate the Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. For now, Kraven the Hunter will be the last entry in the franchise, and ending this series would definitely be the right move.
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