What’s going on with Sony’s Spider-Man Universe? That’s a fair question to be asking right about now. With Venom: The Last Dance now out in theaters, the Venom Trilogy is complete, while Sony’s Marvel movie offerings have expanded to include characters like Morbius (Jared Leto), Madame Web (Dakota Johnson), Kraven the Hunter (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) and an entire animated Spider-Verse of variant characters, led by Miles Morales (Shamiek Moore).
The major issue in all this is that there’s been little to no connective tissue established between Spider-Man spinoff projects, even though Sony keeps touting the “Sony’s Spider-Man Universe” brand as the same type of interconnected universe that Marvel Studios has built. The Venom movies never once referenced Spider-Man in any way, and brought Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock to the Marvel Cinematic Universe and back with no payoff. Morbius confused everyone with Easter egg posters of a video game Spider-Man and a post-credits scene that bafflingly brought Michael Keaton’s Vulture from the MCU to the SSU. Madame Web’s future-seeing connection to any of this is unclear (as a film set years before the events of Venom or Morbius); as are the Spider-Verse animated films, which seem aware of other realities featuring Spider-Man, but have yet to acknowledge any of the SSU spinoffs.
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In short: things are a mess. The SSU is the most fractured and disorganized of the current comic book movie universes, with little to no indication of any point of crossover convergence coming up soon. Now, Venom: The Last Dance has complicated matters even further: the threequel introduced the symbiote god Knull as a big bad villain for the franchise, even as it ended the story of Tom Hardy’s Venom. The post-credits scene of Venom 3 made it clear that Knull has a larger arc coming – but how this version of Marvel’s “King In Black” crossover event (and the battle for Earth against Knull) will unfold is still very much unclear. The villain seems wasted as a big bad that causes the Sony-Marvel characters to unite – plus, there’s been no real established foundation for Morbius, Madame Web, or Miles Morales to be connected to Knull in any way – and little reason to think that Kraven the Hunter will be the glue that fastens it all together.
Marvel fans have begun to speculate that “King in Black” could become an event that crosses over into the MCU, following the Marvel Multiverse’s collapse in Avengers: Doomsday, or its inevitable reboot after Avengers: Secret Wars. At this point, Sony’s best bet may be fully admitting that they need Marvel Studios’ help to execute a larger franchise universe plan – and maybe that the Spider-Man brand isn’t enough to stand on its own as a blockbuster franchise universe – if it ever was.
Venom: The Last Dance is in theaters.
