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The other day, Sony head Tom Rothman said he wants to relaunch Sony's boutique version of the Marvel Universe.

In case you missed it, Sony currently owns the rights to make them make movies about Spider-Man and any other characters who are connected to Spider-Man in the comic books — but not the rights to use most Marvel Comics characters. That's why we got movies about Venom, Madame Web, Kraven the Hunter, and Morbius. Three of those attempted franchises were ultimately unsuccessful, while Venom — the only character with name recognition outside of hardcore fans — spawned a successful trilogy. 

So now Rothman wants to take another crack at relaunching what used to be called the Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters, or SPUMC for short. It just rolls off the tongue.

I actually think there are plenty of great movies to be made about Spidey’s supporting cast — even if you can't use Peter Parker himself because he's currently appearing in a series of MCU films that Sony is either co-producing or licensing him to.

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What I don't think is a viable plan is to keep picking minor antagonists like Morbius and trying to turn them into movie stars. That always felt doomed to failure from the start. I know literally one thing about Morbius in the comics: Peter Parker had grown an extra pair of arms before facing him back in the day, leading to the iconic visual of a six-limbed hero facing a campy vampire.

The obvious move is to make a series of live-action films about Miles Morales. He's a fantastic character who has not yet appeared in live action, and thanks to the animated Spiderverse trilogy, he now hasn't even bigger following than before. I would literally kill to see Miles Morales in a movie that doesn't revolve around multiverse shenanigans, because I don't think that the multiverse is core to who the character is. (Don't get me wrong, I love the Spiderverse films — I just think there are other places to take the character.) I believe a Miles Morales film would be a license to print money, and can’t really think of many non-shitty explanations why it’s not already in the works.

As for other options… As I previously wrote, I think a movie about the Daily Bugle could absolutely work — a tense thriller about 24 hours in a newsroom in the middle of a crisis. That pretty much writes itself, and allows you to feature a lot of characters in the Spider-Man orbit. 

I'm going to go further and say that if you’re making a movie about Spider-Man's world but you can't feature Spidey himself, there is one other clear protagonist you can feature. Nope, not Venom, or any other bad guy. I’m talking about New York city. NYC arguably is as important a character as Peter Parker himself in a lot of Spider-Man comics, and if you take Peter Parker out of the equation, NYC is the hero you’re left with. 

One thing I've noticed after watching the Venom films, Madame Web, and bits and pieces of the other two is that they never seem to take place anywhere recognizable. (I remember Madame Web is a paramedic, so we do see ambulances, and there’s a whole sequence in a Burger King, but I don’t remember feeling like her story was anchored in a specific place.) So I’d really work on having a strong sense of place in a Spidey spinoff. 

Which brings me back to the Daily Bugle, since even a struggling daily newspaper occupies a vitally important place in the life of its hometown. I also think you could make a hell of a movie about the Osborn family, whose members keep becoming the Green Goblin no matter how much they try not to. And the various succession style power struggles inside their company, Oscorp.

If I suddenly replaced Tom Rothman — a situation that would probably give the Sony shareholders a nervous breakdown — I wouldn't be trying to greenlight a whole slate of non-Spidey Marvel movies. Instead I would focus on developing one extra-strong script that revolves around life in New York. Including New York's greatest newspaper, the Bugle, and its ruling family of oligarchs. Throw in the Black Cat and some other petty criminals stirring the pot, and you've got a near limitless series of storylines. 

Or, once again, they could just make a Miles Morales live-action film, which would absolutely crush everything. 

I wrote a few years ago that the strength of the Marvel Cinematic Universe wasn't the shared universe thing. Rather, the MCU was popular because it had built a successful brand. People didn't go see the next MCU movie because they thought it would include pieces of the big scavenger hunt leading to the next Avengers film. Instead, they were willing to take a chance on every random MCU project in the 2010s because they trusted the brand and believed the MCU would stick to a certain level of quality. Feckless people believed the crossovers and easter eggs were the source of the MCU’s strength and feebly tried to reverse-engineer it.

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I think the age of shared universes is over. I think you can still have a shared setting, which is a somewhat different concept. A setting just means you acknowledge that all of these films and other installments are happening in the same world with the same rules, but there are no explicit links between stories except for once in a blue moon, when it really makes sense.

I think to the extent a single continuity was a value-add in the 2010s, it was because people just really loved superhero films and wanted to see as many of them as possible. So the shared canon was a little cherry on top. 

Wonder Man was easily the best thing the MCU has done in the 2020s, in large part because it was just a really engaging character study without much baggage to speak of. (It definitely helped if you remembered Iron Man 3, but you could follow it just fine without seeing anything.)

Both DC and Marvel seem to be doubling down on endless crossovers and universes that straddle TV and movies, like someone in a deep hole who tries to get out by digging faster. I’m super curious to see how this turns out, but I have a feeling I already know. 

So again, Sony shouldn't concoct a master plan for twenty films that take place in Spider-Man's world without Spider-Man. They should cook up one really solid film that’s character focused and has a strong sense of place, and use that as a foundation to build from if people like it. 

Bonus Mini Rant: an intriguing new trend 

There are three films coming out soon which appear to have the exact same concept, at least judging from their trailers: a young woman, or group of young women, are trapped with powerful evil people hunting them, and they turn the tables on their hunters, slaughtering them with maximum gore.

There's They Will kill You, starring Zazie Beetz, whose trailer made me bounce with joy at seeing Beetz absolutely wiping out a building full of rich people who want to hunt her for sport.

Then there's Pretty Lethal, featuring Uma Thurman as a sadistic villain who is hunting a gaggle of prima ballerinas in Budapest — only to have the ballerinas use their dance skills to slaughter a whole army of guys.

Both They Will Kill You and Pretty Lethal release on the same late-March weekend: in theaters and on Amazon Prime respectively, in what is either a coincidence or a deliberate attempt by one movie to steal the other’s thunder. (Hard to say, honestly.)

And finally, there is Ready or Not 2: Here I Come, the sequel to a movie with which I was unfamiliar. A bunch of rich families are hunting two sisters — one of whom is the final girl from the first movie — and whoever kills them gets to rule the world. But the sisters turn the tables, at least judging from the trailer. It features Sarah Michelle Gellar in the Uma Thurman role.

I was talking about this with a friend, and they said this seemed like a reimagining of the rape-revenge subgenre from the 1970s, as discussed in Carol Clover’s essential book Men, Women and Chainsaws. Which feels pretty spot-on, and I’d just add that right now seeing young ladies just utterly devastate smug powerful jerks feels instantly cathartic. As usual, corporate America works hard to pander to our fantasies of taking down its own leadership.

These films do remind me of a couple of recent movies I enjoyed: Damsel, in which Millie Bobby Brown is sacrificed to a dragon and has to fight her way out. And The Princess, in which an abducted princess is engaged to be married to an evil prince and basically slaughters everyone in the castle.

Anyway, we need a name for this subgenre of ladies turning the tables on their hunters: girl splatter power? IDK.

Even Shorter Bonus Mini-Rant

I have a vague idea that I haven’t quite crystalized yet, but it goes like this.

I believe a day is coming when a lot of old intellectual property will become worthless. People will lose interest in Batman and James Bond, the same way nobody cares anymore about Tarzan or Doc Savage. This will be some sort of generational shift, and feels inevitable.

My vague, unformed notion is that corporate consolidation will make this day arrive sooner. As we move towards a handful of corporations controlling most legacy IP, the drive to exploit these properties to justify the cost of mergers will lead to more overexposure. And people will begin to tire of the house style of these few corporations.

To the extent that giant corporate mega-mergers are driven by the desire to own as much IP as possible, I think it’s very likely this might backfire and result in more assets losing their value at a much faster rate. But I guess we’ll see.