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Tony Vinciquerra, the Sony Pictures CEO, said critics are to blame for the box office failure of its recent Marvel movies "Kraven the Hunter" and "Madame Web."
Sony has owned the rights to Spider-Man and other superhero characters since buying them from Marvel in the 1990s. In 2017, Sony launched a new series of Marvel movies, a rival to Disney's popular Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Some have done pretty well, like the "Venom" trilogy, which stars Tom Hardy as the titular antihero and has collectively made some $1.8 billion, according to TheNumbers.com.
Others less so, particularly "Madame Web" and "Kraven the Hunter," released in February and December respectively.
According to Box Office Mojo, "Madame Web" just broke $100 million worldwide, and "Kraven the Hunter" has made $43 million at the time of writing.
"Madame Web" had a budget of $80 million per Forbes, and Variety reported that "Kraven the Hunter" had a budget of more than $100 million, marking both as uninspiring returns on investment.
Speaking to The Los Angeles Times, Vinciquerra described "Kraven" as "the worst launch" that Sony has had since starting its Marvel franchise.
He said: "So that didn't work out very well, which I still don't understand, because the film is not a bad film."
"Kraven" currently has a 17% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Vinciquerra went on to defend "Madame Web," which received a lowly 11% score.
He said: "'Madame Web' underperformed in the theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix. For some reason, the press decided that they didn't want us making these films out of 'Kraven' and 'Madame Web,' and the critics just destroyed them."
"They also did it with 'Venom,' but the audience loved 'Venom' and made 'Venom' a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason," he said.
The movies are origin stories for Spider-Man characters, and are distinct from the Tom Holland-led "Spider-Man" movies in the Disney Marvel franchise.
"Madame Web" was met with overwhelming criticism on its release. The Daily Telegraph's Robbie Collin said: "What an unreservedly hopeless film this is: a sort of two-hour explosion in a boringness factory, in which the forces of dullness and stupidity combine in new and infinitely perturbing ways."
The Wall Street Journal's Zachary Sprang tore into "Kraven" and wrote: "About as exciting as the board meeting from which it surely sprang."
Vinciquerra also suggested that the studio might need a new strategy in light of the persistently poor critical showing.
He said: "I do think we need to rethink it, just because it's snake-bitten. If we put another one out, it's going to get destroyed, no matter how good or bad it is."
For now, Sony hasn't announced its next live-action Marvel movie, although it's soon to release an animated Spider-Man sequel, "Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse."
