After some last-minute changes that ensured, come Hell or high water, that Venom (2018) will reach as many paying customers as possible, Sony’s Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movie handily won its opening weekend. Despite production woes, atrocious reviews and even worse word of mouth, they still managed to sell Tom Hardy in gooey blackface to the public to the tune of $80 million. Along with its fellow Freshman feature, Oscar frontrunner A Star Is Born (2018), which made a stellar $40 million, it headlined a record-breaking box office weekend for the month of October.
And yet, despite the unquestionable monetary success of the film, Venom is in trouble: big trouble. For all intents and purposes, Sony shorted the movie: visibly cutting corners in order to squeeze every last penny it could from ravenous moviegoers. Its long-promised R rating was dropped to a teen-friendly PG-13. Its runtime was cut down to the marrow: ensuring a short, profitable runtime that will ensure that the studio can squeeze in as many screenings as possible into one day.
The movie, in short, is terrible: with a stuttering narrative that left a full 40 minutes — including Tom Hardy’s favorite scenes — on the cutting room floor. Whatever world-building Sony hoped for in order to build up its broader Marvel-adjacent cinematic universe was similarly excised. All we’re left with is a poorly animated lead, perplexingly played by an actor who is far too good for this material, inaudibly gargling his stilted lines through a mouthful of hot phlegm while he kills time between opening and closing credits.
Sony did what Sony set out to do: it cashed its last chips at the box office. It made a tidy profit off of a mid-priced superhero film that’s been in some state of development for the last decade. They broke some records, beat out the competition and will continue to rake in money until the end of Venom‘s inevitably short runtime (if its scathing word of mouth is anything to go by).
The problem is that Sony accomplished off of this by nakedly manipulating the film’s core audience and openly maligning everybody else. They chopped their cash cow up into hamburger when they went back on their promise to deliver a hard-R action franchise. They killed whatever future prospects they had in the property when they sliced its narrative and characters into ribbons that never made it into theaters. They resoundingly killed any chance of growing this brand into the sizable franchise it could have been, all in the name of some quick cash before their presumed exit from the movie business.
Sony’s promising us a franchise out of this mess. Then again, Sony promised us an R-rated action-horror franchise that honored then fan-favorite villain-cum-antihero, and we see where that got us this weekend. This was their last chance to do something meaningful with their Marvel movie rights, and they blew it on, well, whatever the Hell this was.
Call it a pyrrhic victory. This is unquestionably the last live-action, Sony-made Marvel movie we’re going to see before they sell themselves off to the highest bidder.