Following Sony’s brief split from Marvel Studios, Tom Holland pitched Venom and Kraven the Hunter movies. After acquiring Spider-Man and the characters from Stan Lee and Steve Ditko’s comics in the late 1990s, Sony used them in several films over the years, starting with Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy in the early aughts and Marc Webb’s short-lived The Amazing Spider-Man films.
Sony now owns these characters outright. Because of the lukewarm reception to Andrew Garfield’s sequel, Sony and Marvel have agreed to share the rights to Spider-Man and introduce a new iteration with Tom Holland in Captain America: Civil War.
Tom Holland’s first spidey movie was a box office success, and Sony immediately began developing its Spider-Man universe, starting with Venom, starring Tom Hardy. This universe would be known as Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.
The movie was a critical and commercial failure, but the sequel, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, and the long-awaited Morbius, starring Jared Leto, helped revive the franchise. Aaron Taylor-Johnson has been cast in the title role of a Kraven the Hunter film in development, though another Marvel actor may have helped get the project off the ground.
The Future of Holland’s Spider-Man
Ahead of the release of Spider-Man: No Way Home, Holland spoke with Empire about the brief split between Sony and Marvel. After the announcement, the actor went to Amy Pascal’s house and discussed his character’s future with her, including the Venom and Kraven the Hunter movies. Take a look at what Holland had to say about it after the break:
“On the day that the announcement happened that I would no longer be in the MCU… I just drove over to Amy Pascal’s house and sat with her by her pool, and we sat there for hours, just chatting, and pitching movies. How would we do a film without Marvel? Does Peter Parker fall through a portal, and then he’s in the Venom world? Or do we do a Kraven the Hunter film? It was a nice distraction… because as a young kid I was so in love with Marvel, and I was so lucky to be a part of it that when they took the rug from under my feet, I was not ready to say goodbye yet.”
Sony’s Brief Split From Marvel
Holland’s pitch to Pascal for a Kraven the Hunter movie shows his devotion to the comics and his desire to keep his Spider-Man legacy alive on the big screen in the future. No actor was cast as The Sinister Six despite studio attempts to make the iconic villain appear on screen throughout the 2010s.
Teasers for a Sinister Six film were first included in The Amazing Spider-Man 2, but all plans for the franchise were shelved due to the film’s box office failure.
While Antoine Fuqua was initially slated to direct the SSU’s sole feature film in2018, it was shelved until Triple Frontier’s J.C. Chandor was brought on board to helm the project last year, working from a new script by Uncharted writers Art Marcum and Matt Holloway.
While the Kraven the Hunter movie is still a few years away, Venom: Let There Be Carnage has already begun the bridging of worlds between the MCU and SSU.
Both studios continue to tease the depth of coordination between them to properly handle the sharing of characters despite the many questions surrounding the nature of its post-credits scene. Spider-Man: No Way Home, which opens in theatres on December 17, will see this multiverse fusion continue.
