It seems like there’s no stopping Spider-Man. Spider-Man: Homecoming, the 2017 movie that introduced Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, performed moderately well at the box office, but every one after that has outshone the previous one. Now, Spider-Man: Brand New Day has smashed Avengers: Endgame’s biggest record for best domestic opening weekend.
But just using a Spider-Man property isn’t enough to secure box-office success, and there’s no better argument than the Sonyverse movies, the franchise of non-Spider-Man Spider-Man movies that attempted to create their own cinematic universe. There were some bright spots, like the Venom trilogy, and then there were the more regrettable — and more meme-able — movies like Madame Web and Morbius. Now, while the MCU’s Spider-Man reaches new heights, it seems like Sony’s Spider-Verse is officially dead.
Variety recently asked Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman about the future Sonyverse movie plan. Rothman, riding high on the success of Brand New Day, was very matter-of-fact about the misstep. “Ultimately, the audience wasn’t satisfied enough with them. Whether that’s a fair assessment of those movies, who knows,” he said. “That’s howling into the wind. The audience is the boss, and they didn’t respond. It’s as simple as that.”
With that in mind, he doesn’t completely rule out another Spidey-adjacent movie in the future, but that doesn’t mean the Sonyverse will return. “Right now, we don’t know. 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.”
But just because there aren’t any Sonyverse movies in development, that doesn’t mean that all of the characters involved are doomed to never appear again. Venom, in particular, is already confirmed to come back to screens soon again, albeit in a new form. In February 2026, Sony announced that Venom is getting an animated movie from Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein, the directors of Final Destination: Bloodlines.
There’s also the long-gestating threequel Beyond the Spider-Verse, part of Sony’s other massively popular spinoff, the stylized animated trilogy. So Sony has plenty of Spidey on its plate, and clearly that’s the appeal for fans, not the tangential characters who don’t have established lore. Maybe the appetite has gone for the live-action movies, and that’s totally okay. We’ll always have Morbin’ Time.
