 If someone were to ask me, Adam, what's the most embarrassing cinematic universe that springs to mind? I wouldn't say Marvel. They've given us a lot of great movies over the years. Sure, they've stumbled, but they kind of were the playbook for a long time. I wouldn't even say the DCEU. Now I'm gonna be rebranded DCEU under James Gunn. Sure, a lot of misses in there, but they occasionally had something that really worked. I would not even go as far as to say the Dark Universe, which lasted an embarrassing one movie, The Mummy, along with a terrible photo op of all the actors that aren't gonna be in future films. No, what I would say is the Sony Spider-Man universe that doesn't even contain Spider-Man. And I'm gonna tell you why. Let's have a good old-fashioned rant. Even though the Dark Universe only lasted one movie, they at least had the common decency to pull themselves out. They said, this isn't working. Let's not push forward. People aren't liking what we're putting out. Sony, on the other hand, has the audacity to keep putting out garbage after garbage film. Before I go any further, I would appreciate a quick subscribe from you. If you're new to the channel and you just stumbled upon this, you might appreciate the rants, you might appreciate the honesty, occasional comedy. I tried to do it all here. It's all movie-related 24-7. Short for 7. So go ahead and hit a subscribe. Let's get started. Behind the scenes at Sony and Marvel, there's a lot going on. Discussions, arguments, agreements, who knows what else. Murder? Possibly. I just made it up, but it could be true. This all really stems back to when Disney acquired a lot of the Marvel properties, but they could not get their hands on Sony and some of the Fox stuff, like X-Men, Fantastic Four. But Disney could wait. They could wait and buy out Fox. But Sony's barely playing ball. They're the lone warrior that is not going to bend the knee. They're not going to give in to Disney. They're hanging out to Spider-Man for all he's worth. And spoiler, he's worth a lot. And Sony knows this. That's why they have distribution rights. That's why they get final say on all the products that Marvel Disney puts out. Because they are the ones making almost all of the money. Whenever a Disney Spider-Man film comes out, Sony gets 95% of the theatrical pull that goes to the studios. These negotiations have changed over the years. And for a while, there was actually not going to be any more Tom Holland Spider-Man movies at all. Disney was going to be done because Sony did not want to give in at all. At one point, Disney was like, hey, could we maybe get a 50-50 split on this since we're making most of it? It's in our universe. And Sony's like, no, no, absolutely not. But they eventually came to an agreement. And I guess there's a new trilogy on the way for Spider-Man Tom Holland. We'll see if it plays out. But today, I'm more interested in what's happening on Sony's neck of the woods. Because around 2017, they decided, hey, we're going to put the big boy pants on and try our hand at more Spider-Man films. Now, we're not talking about Into the Spider-Verse and Across the Spider-Verse and Beyond the Spider-Verse. Those animated films are fantastic. Sony should honestly just stick to animation. And what I would love to see going forward is for them to see how well these are performing and how well they're being received and going all in on it and saying, all right, maybe we spin off from the Across the Spider-Verse stuff, maybe a Spider-Gwen movie, maybe a Spider-Nuar movie or a Spider-Ham. There's so many options. But today, we're focusing on Venom. We're focusing on Morbius. We're focusing on Madame Webb and the absolute embarrassment that comes with each of these films. So like I said, around 2017, probably earlier, but the dates, the dates are kind of irrelevant. Really, really, it all comes down to Sony wants to have their own Spider-Man movies, but they can't have Spider-Man in them. They can, however, because of the agreement, use a lot of the rogue's gallery of characters. So we have Madame Webb. We have Morbius Craven. Who else is Craven that movie at this point? I can't imagine anyone, but we'll get there. We'll get there. Venom comes out. It's well received, I guess, makes a ton of money, a stupid amount of money, and it gives Sony the bad impression. It gives off a bad impression of, hey, people are willing to pay a good amount of money to see a bad amount to film, and so they're gonna just do the same thing over and over again. But I knew. I knew, and many others knew, that this was a bad first impression. Venom's a pretty shit movie. Watchable, sure. Good. I don't think so. And you can play back the tape. I have a review out, maybe a spoiler review, and I know I reviewed Venom, too. I'm very consistent. You might not agree with my opinion, but I stay the course. And I have never liked the Sony universe. These movies look like shit. They look low budget as hell, low effort as hell. The Sam Raimi Spider-Man movies are like two decades old now, and they look so much better than everything Sony has come out with. That's embarrassing. That just shows you the low effort they're putting into these films. When I look at Venom 1, I think to myself, alright, this is a movie made for angsty teens, like young teens, 11, 12, 13-year-old kids, typically boys, who are really psyched up to be going to a movie that's kind of masquerading as a rated R film, but it's PG-13, takes place mostly at night. You have a big bulking alien symbiote dude biting heads off camera, maybe throwing out that one F-bomb because it's PG-13. You can get away with one. It's just so edgy. But for everyone else, I can't imagine the film was anything more than, ah, alright, that was okay. That was good, maybe. That's kind of the consensus I saw. I don't know anyone that's like, oh fuck yeah, Venom's great. It's got that Eminem song in it. It's just really treading some new ground. Can't wait to see more Venom. Eddie Brock is just such a weird non-character in this. He's portrayed as the cool bad boy, but he's also called a loser and it hasn't accomplished anything. Like it just doesn't even make sense from personality characteristics. Nothing adds up in these movies. The villain is so stock and generic. And then we get to Venom 2. Let There Be Carnage, or as I call it, Let There Be Garbage. This film is far worse than the first one because it's basically the same-ass movie again, but with the great villain that they ruined completely. You have fucking Woody Harrelson in this movie as Carnage? You know, when you hear the word Carnage, what comes to mind? Chaos? Anarchy? Bedlam? Mass destruction? Mass murder? Terror? What about a wedding? That uh, that come to mind? Wedding? Because that's what this whole movie's about. Let There Be Carnage is an hour 45 or so of Carnage breaking out of prison where he admittedly kills a bunch of people very quickly and then going with this girl to a church where they can get married. That is the fucking plot. That is the best script someone could come up with in an afternoon. That's embarrassing. It's ridiculous. It's preposterous and it happened and it made a bunch of money again. And so Sony is just learning all the wrong lessons all the time because us stupid idiots keep going to these movies. Listen, I go because I'm a critic and I'm going to go review everything and warn people about what to see and what not to see. At this point with the SSU, I could just say don't go to any of them because they all suck. By the way, SSU, that's hilarious. Sony Spider-Man Universe is what that stands for. That's their official acronym. They've had several going into this. It was like the Sony Marvel Universe, the Sony Spider Marvel Universe all over the place, and they landed squarely on the SSU. Which is incredibly ironic because Spider-Man hasn't been in any of these films unless you count Baby Peter Parker at one point or another, or a tiny little Easter egg, or like the ending of Let There Be Garbage where Venom goes through the multiverse and ends up in a bar that has Tom Holland's Spider-Man in it, but then in the next movie he's warped back to his universe and a tiny little bit of symbiote is left behind. I can't even remember what that was. I think that was in No Way Home. It doesn't matter. None of this matters because I'm thinking that we're not going to see a lot more SSU, or at least maybe that's my hope, but I'm going to get there. I'm going to push forward to that point where I talk about that. We got two more movies. We got Morbius. It's Morbentime. It's atrociously bad. Jared Leto, who hasn't really been in a good movie in quite a while, you may know him as the worst version of the Joker ever. He is playing such a miserable sack of shit here. And again, these are villains in Spider-Man that they've all turned into anti-heroes that you don't want to root for because they're all just kind of stock one-dimensional idiots. I cannot stand these characters at all. This film is trying to be edgier like Venom, again held back by PG-13. If I want to see a dude with vampiric skill killing people, I'll watch two of the Blade movies with Wesley Snipes. Those movies get the audience and they nail the tone. Hard R, lot of blood, lot of action, swearing, violence, great one-liners, creativity. Morbius is none of that. Morbius is more watered-down, kitty bullshit, PG-13 nonsense. And let me put this out here. Let me discredit myself in the eyes of some people just to show how consistent I am and how little I care about mass appeal. The Marvels would have been a very easy target for me to go in and say, this movie sucks. Let me tell you why. Let me list the ways. But I found the movie was perfectly fine. A dumb Saturday morning cartoon. It's an hour and 45 minutes long with a memorable schlocky villain, three leads that are having fun playing off each other, and a tone that is obviously not for adult men but for younger audiences, young girls and boys, and even people that just want to watch a family flick and not think too hard about it. That's what the Marvels is. It understands what it's supposed to be. And I have no problem saying, yeah, it's fine if you're into that popcorn sugar shit. I like it from time to time when it works and it doesn't overstay its welcome. The Marvels did. It didn't overstay its welcome. It was fine. Now, I watched it with my wife, my daughter, and my son. Connor's 11. He doesn't give a shit about girls in anything. That's just the nature of boys at that age. Even if I try to like push him and say like, hey, you know, girls are cool too. Women can get things done. He doesn't give a fuck. He's like, no, I'm going to go watch the three ninjas. I'm going to go watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I'm going to go watch something with ninjas and guys in it. And that's fine. He walked away. My wife didn't give a crap either. She's like, yeah, I don't need this. You know, call me when Thorth shows up. Women don't champion women, apparently, or at least mine doesn't. My daughter, however, was all in. She loved the movie. So I sat and watched it with her. We had a good time. We moved on with our day. Who's, who's Madam Web 4? Who the fuck is Madam Web 4? You got four very attractive women, three of which are playing high schoolers and they're all in their twenties, like mid twenties, two of them. And then you have Dakota Johnson who can't act your way out of a paper bag for the most part. Although I heard she's good in something at some point in time, but I don't give a crap about Dakota Johnson. And she's miserable in this. And this is what I'm judging. Madam Web doesn't seem to have an audience in mind at all. Another PG 13 cookie cutter pile of crap. No, I can't even say cookie cutter. There's no cookie. There's no cutter. They don't even have the oven turned on for this thing to bake. The script is so nonsensically stupid. It's really just a smattering of different ideas and concepts that don't congeal in the slightest. You have a woman who can see the future and she's for some reason on the run from the cops because an evil Spider-Man framed her somehow. But the cops never pursue her again after that one moment. The bad guy is working with some expert hacker woman who just shows up. I don't think she's given a name. And she's definitely not given an arc. She just goes away. She's never caught. She's never, like, killed. She's just gone. Just completely gone. And Pepsi Cola seems to be the primary hero of the film. Because Madam Web and the girls don't even suit up for more than 10 seconds of screen time. Meanwhile, the Pepsi Cola can, the Pepsi sign, it's all over this film. It has more time on screen than Madam Web does in her superhero outfit. Fuck you, SOTY. This stuff is so bottom of the barrel insulting. And the fact that I still see a comment from time to time that says, Adam, you're lying. You actually like this movie or Adam, this movie was good. You don't know what you're talking about. Watch more movies if you think this was good or just like look at the film a bit more objectively and you'll see that there is just nothing to this. The action's terrible. The dialogue's worse. The effects are miserable. How does a movie that's 30 years older than this look so much better? Because SOTY doesn't give a shit. At all. They just don't care. And it's very apparent here when the bad guy Spider-Man only climbs on two or three different walls and jumps on maybe three cars, never really swings a web, never really showcases any super strength. There is nothing to this film at all. It is obviously there just to make money and good luck because people are wising up. Morbius failed completely. Madam Web made six million its opening day. Granted it was Valentine's Day, but not a good look. These people were so goddamn stupid. They didn't think to have any reshoots putting Sydney Sweeney in a crop top. That's a selling point for a lot of people, folks. When you can't even get sex appeal in the film, you have nothing going for it. Look back at the Charlie's Angels movies with Cameron Diaz. They at least knew their audience. Make them loud. Make them dumb. Put the women in hot outfits. You have an easy sell here. Madam Web dresses everyone up. They make these characters boring. They're not fun. They have no personalities other than snark, sarcasm, and occasional bitchy little comments. There is nothing here that's going to bring guys into the theaters. There's nothing here that's going to bring women into the theaters. Sony doesn't know what they're doing and this goes all the way back to when they were trying to name their universe. They couldn't even get that right. They finally settled on SSU not that long ago. Venom came out in 2018. That was like five or six years back and when No Way Home came out things got even more confusing because Andrew Garfield got a huge bump in popularity. Sony, of course, made those amazing Spider-Man films along with the Sam Raimi stuff to be fair back in the day. They used to make good movies. They used to a long time ago. So they looked at that reaction and they thought, well maybe Andrew Garfield's our Spider-Man and not Tom Holland. He kind of lines up more for us because the look of the Mark Webb movies were darker, more angsty, and so we could put him in. And so that put Madam Webb in an even worse spot because the scripts being rewritten constantly, they're not sure which Spider-Man they're going to allude to and they end up just throwing it all out the window and saying, Madam Webb is its own thing. It's its own universe because we're in the multiverse. So nothing matters. We can have a Vulture show up over here. We can have a Tom Holland reference over there. We can maybe have an Andrew Garfield thing. It doesn't matter. We don't give a shit and you can tell. As of right now from what I've read, they have two more movies slated to come out. Craven, which obviously everyone's looking forward to. Everyone's really Craven in that film. And we have Venom 3. Venom 3 is probably going to make money because it's Venom. He's the closest thing you're going to get to a Spider-Man film from Sony. He looks like an emo Spider-Man, you know, with teeth. But that's enough to get people to the theaters. But then we also have this Craven situation and I have a feeling it's going to be another bomb. Probably not as bad as Madam Webb, but I think we might get Morbius levels here. The trailer they released looks as low energy half-assed as all these other ones do. The big question is will Sony learn a lesson from this? I think maybe they will. With two major flops on the way and a third potentially coming out with Craven, I think they're going to look at this and they're going to say, yeah, we might need to pump the brakes. We might need to just enjoy the money we're making off the Disney partnership. We might want to focus more on the animation side of things and then we could potentially circle back around and start over. We could DCU this thing. We could find our James Gunn to come into the fold and fix this broken thing. Start over, start anew. Will they do it? Who the hell knows? But money talks and right now it's yelling at Sony to start selling some PlayStation 6 because they need a huge bump. They need to offset the garbage that they've been putting out. Well, there you have it. My thoughts on the Sony Spider-Man universe that doesn't have Spider-Man in it. Let me know what you think about this thing in the comments below. Are you kind of cool with it? Do you like the look and the vibe and everything going on? Or are you like me and you think this whole thing is a shit show? Shut it down. Switch it off. Toss it in the trash. Start over later or never at all because Sony doesn't seem to really have any interest in making films that feel like films and less like properties. I want to hear from you. Again, please think about subscribing to the channel. I post tons of movie content each and every week. I keep it light. I keep it fun. I hope to hear from you. If you love this video, there's a super thanks icon underneath it. You can say, here's two bucks, Adam. Great job. Or here's 25 bucks, Adam. Really great job. I liked how you said it's morban time. And then I liked how you followed that up with it's madame time or madame web in time. I don't know how you really use that one, but madame web stands, I'm sure will let me know. All right, that's all I have for you. Hopefully I see you next time. Take care.