Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff universe is right back where fans figured it was: nowhere.
Fresh off Spider-Man: Brand New Day posting the biggest domestic opening in box office history, Sony Pictures boss Tom Rothman tells Variety that no movies built around Sony’s other Marvel characters are in active development.
Asked if there are plans to keep developing Sony’s universe of Marvel characters, Rothman said the studio doesn’t know right now.
He added that Sony never looked at the films as a “Sony-Marvel Universe,” saying the studio only ever asked whether there were worthwhile movies to make with those characters.
“At the moment, there are none in active development,” Rothman said.
When the interviewer started to bring up the status of the spinoff characters, Rothman quipped that the reporter had plenty of company wanting an answer.
A Walk Back From February
That answer lands a lot differently than it did five months ago.
Back in February, Rothman went on Matt Belloni’s The Town podcast and confirmed a full reboot of the live-action spinoff universe with new actors.
Asked then if the spinoff universe was dead, he said no. Asked if Sony would return to those characters, he said yes. Asked if that meant a fresh start with a new cast, another yes.
Now the reboot talk is gone, replaced by an admission that Sony simply doesn’t know. Nothing is announced, nothing is in development, and Rothman isn’t pretending otherwise.
Why The Slate Collapsed
Rothman also delivered the bluntest autopsy yet on why the slate collapsed.
The Venom trilogy turned Tom Hardy’s symbiote into a franchise worth more than $1.8 billion at the box office, but Morbius became a meme, Madame Web got shredded, and Kraven the Hunter died on arrival.
His read on Kraven and Madame Web is that audiences weren’t satisfied with them, and whether that’s fair to either movie is beside the point.
The audience is the boss, as Rothman put it, and this boss didn’t respond.
Rothman went further in the same interview, torching the superhero fatigue narrative and arguing the genre’s real problem is predictability, not burned-out audiences.
Full breakdown: the Sony boss confirms superhero fatigue is a myth.
The One Spinoff That Worked Is On TV
The none-in-active-development line covers the theatrical side, and it’s worth noting where these characters are actually connecting right now: television.
Spider-Noir, the Nicolas Cage series at Amazon, debuted as a top 3 streaming program in the U.S. and beat a stack of Netflix originals in its first week, giving Amazon a real Season 2 case.
An animated Venom movie with Tom Hardy producing is also in the works, so the symbiote isn’t going anywhere either.
Also on the animated side, the third Spider-Verse movie is due out June 18, 2027.
The takeaway: Sony’s Marvel characters aren’t dead. They’re just not getting nine-figure theatrical movies until Sony finds one actually worth making, and after Madame Web and Kraven, that bar sits a lot higher than it used to.
With Brand New Day rewriting the record books and Rothman saying yes to Spider-Man 5 with Tom Holland, the studio has zero pressure to force another Morbius.
Whenever the spinoff universe does return, expect the clean-slate reboot Rothman teased in February. Just don’t expect it soon.
