Out of Ideas

I was originally planning to write a long, derisive post about Warner Brothers' announcement that they will be making a Justice League movie, immediately after their Superman vs. Batman film, which has yet to even start filming, but someone's comment on the internet summarized what I was thinking in less than ten words: I'll believe it when I see it.

What I can't quite believe, however, is Sony Pictures' announcement that they actually intend to make a Sinister Six spinoff, or, for the uninitiated, a whole movie about six of Spider-Man's deadliest enemies. Basically, Sony is betting that audiences, a large chunk of them families, will pay to see an expensive, two-hour movie about bad guys whose mission in life it is to kill Spider-Man.

I understand Sony's quandary; Spider-Man is the only Marvel property they have left, with the X-Men and Fantastic Four belonging to Twentieth Century Fox, and EVERYTHING else having reverted to Marvel, now owned by the Walt Disney Company. Once upon a time, Sony had rights to as many as THREE Marvel properties, including Spider-Man, but after squandering their resources on two Ghost Rider movies, both critical failures, the second a commercial failure, they let that property go. They were supposed to have a Killraven movie in the pipeline at one point, but that has since fallen through, and all they have left now are Spider-man and related characters.

Of those related characters, only one of them can even be remotely considered a "superhero;" the character Venom, originally conceived as a villain but which took on a life of its own as some sort of twisted anti-hero. Venom was originally the "marriage" of an alien parasite that grafted itself onto Spider-Man, only to be rejected by him, and Eddie Brock, a reporter whose sensationalized stories Spider-Man had unknowingly discredited by catching a criminal and exposing his stories as fraudulent. Marvel has since experimented with the alien costume by giving it a different host; for years it was supervillain Mac Gargan, a.k.a. the Scorpion, but since 2010, the alien has had as its host war hero and double amputee Flash Thompson, a longtime member of Spider-Man's supporting cast who finally joined the ranks of Marvel's superheroes. Whether or not Marvel deliberately took this direction with the character to make him more "movie friendly" or not, the fact of the matter is that "Agent Venom" is now a more viable big-screen hero than the creepy Eddie Brock incarnation of the character would ever have been. One could even imagine the character being featured in a spy-thriller akin to the Bourne movies or even the current Marvel Studios smash hit Captain America: The Winter Soldier.

With the Sinister Six, however, the options are a lot more limited; these guys are straight-up bad guys. They are criminals, basically. Thieves and killers, every one. While this might make the stuff of a great neo-noir movie, like a super-powered version of Reservoir Dogs, the fact of the matter is that a huge part of Spider-Man's target demographic is children, and neither children nor their parents will pay to see a movie about bad guys, so as bad ideas for blockbuster movies go, this one's kind of a doozy.

Avi Arad, who was no longer part of the Marvel Cinematic brain trust by the time Iron Man launched the studio in 2008, has boasted that Sony would only resort to a crossover between Spider-man and the Avengers if they had "run out of ideas."

Time to get on the phone, Avi.