Sony’s Spider-Man spinoff universe is effectively over: no SSU titles are in active development

Sony Pictures chairman Tom Rothman has now said out loud what had been pretty easy to guess: Sony’s Spider-Man Universe is, for all practical purposes, done. No SSU movies are currently in active development. Read that as Sony stepping back from the whole Spider-Man-adjacent run of Venom, Morbius, and Madame Web after several years of uneven results, even as the studio stays firmly invested in Spider-Man himself.

Rothman’s line was, “the audience is the boss,” which tracks with how this stretch played out. Venom was the obvious commercial outlier. Morbius and Madame Web, on the other hand, had a rough time, and that only fed the sense that inconsistent quality control and a Spider-Man universe built without Spider-Man in it were always going to be hard sells. If you keep an eye on Sony’s Marvel strategy, that’s the real takeaway here: Sony seems to view the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies as the thing that actually drives this side of the business, and it reportedly wants Holland to stick around.

There’s also Brand New Day, a title that’s been tied to the next Spider-Man movie. The name gets a little messy, though, because it also points back to the 2008 comic era that came after One More Day, when Peter Parker was pushed back toward a more familiar status quo. So the movie rumor and the comic history are bleeding together a bit. As for Spider-Woman and El Muerto, don’t count on either one moving forward. Both spinoffs are reportedly shelved while Sony turns its Marvel attention back to the next mainline Spider-Man film.