Back in the day, Sony Pictures and Drew Goddard (“The Cabin In The Woods,” “The Martian”) had once been developing a “Sinister Six” film during the Andrew Garfield era of the ‘Spider-Man’ franchise. “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” ended with a tease for that project, but it ultimately didn’t happen as Sony shuttered that iteration of ‘Spider-Man’ and instead decided to reboot the franchise with Marvel Studios as the producers. The studio has since been focused on fleshing out the Spiderverse with a string of spin-off films, so far focusing on villains with “Venom,” “Morbius,” and “Kraven The Hunter.”
GamesRadar+ brought up the idea of these spin-offs leading to a Sinister Six project to “Morbius” director Daniel Espinosa during a recent chat. However, instead, Espinosa mentioned interest in “Secret Wars,” a crossover event in the comics that saw both heroes and villain groups coming together to battle each other. The filmmaker is keen on the idea of a big crossover event with the Sony-verse characters.
“I remember when I was 12 years old, I read a comic book called ‘Secret Wars,’ and it was when they took all the superheroes to a planet and all the super bad guys to a planet, and they had to fight each other,” Espinosa says. “In Marvel, it always has existed, this great fascination of creating groups and new friendships that can oppose other friendships. And I think that all us Marvel fans would die to see the Sony-verse people together.”
While it remains to be seen if the Sony-verse characters will ever make the tricky jump into “Secret Wars” at Marvel Studios (they likely wouldn’t have the rights to that storyline on their own), there is a crossover event that Sony Pictures might be able to do on their own: “Maximum Carnage.”
In that comic book storyline, Carnage and Shriek, characters from “Venom: Let There Be Carnage,” assemble another Sony-owned supervillain team leading to Spider-Man, Venom, Moribus, Black Cat, and others to reluctantly join forces to combat them. It wouldn’t be hard to imagine that being something worthwhile as you could easily throw Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s Kraven and Dakota Johnson’s Madame Web into the cinematic version.
As Sony continues to tease future crossovers in the spin-offs, we still don’t know when Holland’s Peter Parker will be allowed to participate in these Sony-verse films or if the studio is simply fueling that fire as a marketing tactic.