Kraven the Hunter Is a Fittingly Terrible Send-Off to the Worst Superhero Movie Franchise
It’s time to say goodbye to the SUMC superhero movie franchise. Just days before the release of Kraven the Hunter, Sony Pictures announced that the film would mark the end of the SUMC comic book spin-off series, which has chronicled the adventures of various villains and secondary characters from the Spider-Man comi—wait. WAIT A MINUTE. I’m sorry. What?! You’ve never heard of the SUMC franchise? You weren’t even remotely aware that there even was such a thing as the Sony Universe of Marvel Characters? Well. SUMCs to be you.Â
The best way to understand the SUMC is that it was an experiment, almost certainly a sadistic one, with moviegoers as the guinea pigs. The experiment was designed to test just how deep the demand for superhero movies went. And the way that Sony tested that demand was to produce six astoundingly rotten movies, movies so consistently and profoundly terrible that it’s almost impressive—like the filmmakers had to have some sort of reverse genius, or a stroke of incredible bad luck—for them to come out this crappy. Not only were most of these movies truly god-awful, half of them were built around characters that absolutely no one has ever cared about, and without any of the comic book context or character connections that might have made them interesting on the page.Â
Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter were all based on recurring side characters from the Spider-Man comics, and they were tossed into the franchise salad bowl because of decades-old I.P. rights issues. Spider-Man, you see, is a Marvel Comics superhero. But even though Marvel, which today is owned by Disney, has spent the better part of two decades making in-house movies based on its superhero characters via the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the rights to Spider-Man and a range of associated characters have long been held by Sony.Â
Complicating things even further, Spider-Man has appeared in a number of MCU-linked films—but only through an I.P. sharing deal between Marvel Studios and Sony. And Sony, looking at the incredibly success of the MCU, decided to try its luck building out a (mostly, kinda) separate movie universe featuring the other characters it c
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