Let’s just touch on Madame Web for a moment. Madame Web underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided that they didn’t want us making these films out of Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made Venom a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.
That’s a quote by outgoing Sony chief executive and chairman Tony Vinciquerra during an “exit interview” he did with The Los Angeles Times. And while the interview touches on his views on why he thinks California Union laws are too strong and him patting himself on the back for not starting a Sony streaming service, it’s this quote that is getting the lion’s share of the attention.
As well it should. It is a bold statement, and a telling one. Sony’s Spider-Man Universe has mostly been a colossal failure, both with critics and audience. The Venom films were the exception when it comes to the box office, but all the Spider-Man Universe movies were lambasted by the critics.
But is Vinciquerra correct? Did the critics deliberately lie about these films because they want them to fail?
Well, let me answer that question this way; anyone who loves movies and knows a lot about films has asked themselves at one time or another – Do film executives know what they are doing? Thanks to Tony Vinciquerra, we now have an answer, No, they do not have any idea what they are doing.
The Hollywood elite blaming critics is nothing new. Brett Ratner blamed Rotten Tomatoes for the failure of Justice League. And, unfortunately, thinking critics have some grand conspiracy to ruin your favorite movies is not unique either. But this is the first time we have a chief executive and chairman saying this type of garbage.
There is a lot to unpack about Tony Vinciquerra’s statement. So much that I don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with his attack on film critics.
Yes, film critics. The most fearsome and terrifying monsters ever known to man. Enormously powerful and able to ruin movies whenever the whim strikes them. They can ruin a franchise just one review.
If this is even remotely true, then explain the Twilight franchise to me. None of the five films scored higher than 49% at Rotten Tomatoes. The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 scored a pathetic 26% fresh. Yet the franchise earned a combined $3.3 billion worldwide. Or the Transformers films. The critics hated, HATED, that franchise. It made over $5 billion combined at the worldwide box office. Two entries, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and Transformers: Age of Extinction, earned over a billion dollars each. The Tomatometer for those films? 35% and 18% (18%!) respectively.
This is just a small sample size, but I think it is big enough to show that bad reviews do not stop films from becoming monster hits, even if the film gets Madame Web or Kraven the Hunter type Tomatometer reviews. But according to Vinciquerra, the critical lambasting was enough to do in those films.
Now, I am going to give Vinciquerra the benefit of the doubt and say I don’t think he REALLY believes that critics gathered together and decided to ruin his company’s Spider-Man Universe films, because that is absolutely stupid. I have reviewed a bunch of stuff for a bunch of websites, including for FBOL, but I don’t really consider myself an official critic. But here’s a little secret about film critics – they actually want films to be good. And while they love to gather together and talk about movies, they seldom to say they need to destroy Sony’s chance to build a franchise around their Spider-Man characters. Trust me. Film Critics don’t have that kind of power and don’t really care enough about Sony to take that kind of action.
However, Vinciquerra made the bold claim that Morbius, Madame Web and Kraven the Hunter were actually good movies! That in some way all those film critics were lying to their audiences! He said Madame Web did well on Netflix, obviously not recognizing that some people like to watch car wrecks but don’t want to leave the house and pay $18 to see them!
Art is in the eye of the beholder. Your opinion might be different than the next guy. But critics have seen hundreds, if not thousands, of films. They seldom agree on any film. Yet hundreds of critics gave bad reviews to these films. Even the ones that gave positive reviews damned the films with faint praise.
Critics called Morbius dull and rote. It is dull and rote. Madame Web is called poorly cast and ineptly exercised. It is poorly cast and ineptly exercised. Kraven the Hunter was slammed for its bad dialogue and plot holes. It has bad dialogue and plot holes. And I say that as someone who kinda liked Kraven.
Blaming the critics for these films’ failures is insulting but more than that it showed how stupid Sony was with their Spider-Man Universe. Let’s put aside whether or not if these films were good or not. The fact that the primary fault the studio could find, the main reason why they were failures, had nothing to do with them, but rather with critics.
Once again, leaving the quality of the individually films aside, Sony made a whole lot of mistakes with the franchise. They are legion in number. They date all the way back to when they first got the license, but I’ll limit just the “Spider-Man Universe” years.
Did they have a cohesive plan for this universe? By the time Madame Web rolled around, it was apparent that they didn’t. Did any trailer for any of the films move you to want to see it? I remember watching the trailer for Madame Web and found it so boring that I wondered if Sony actually wanted me to see it. And if you saw the trailer and then saw the final movie, you’d see that the movie you got wasn’t the movie they sold you.
Of all the characters for the movies they could have chosen, they chose a villain whose origin was completely linked with Spider-Man (but they weren’t going to use Spider-Man), a supporting character who had his own comic book series 30 years ago and was little seen since, an octogenarian handicapped woman with psychic powers and an egotistical villain whose best story was him committing suicide after beating Spider-Man (but they weren’t going to use Spider-Man).
Almost every movie was hacked to pieces after shooting, put back together with mismatched reshoots and shitty ADR and released as some awkward Frankenstein monster of a movie. But no, Sony bears no responsibility for the failure of these films. It’s all due the critics and their petty vendetta against the films. Bullshit.
As a film critic, I am insulted to be blamed for these films’ failure. As a comic book film fan, I am discouraged. Tony Vinciquerra has shown that Sony has no idea what makes a good comic book movie, has no sense of responsibility of learning, and shifts blame on to others instead of seeing what his company did wrong. He is on his way out the door, so hopefully things will improve. But I’m not optimistic.
