The 2014 Sony hack is one of the biggest information breaches in corporate history—and one that was ultimately hugely important to the cinematic legacy of Spider-Man. Across thousands and thousands of emails, a picture began to emerge of Sony’s increasing floundering over how to approach its ownership of one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, the potential for an ascendant Marvel Studios to come in and offer a helping hand, and, of course, many (many) plans and attempts at spinning Spider-Man off into his own cinematic universe.
For a very long time, most of that plan centered on the Sinister Six—six of Spidey’s rogues, usually spearheaded by Doc Ock, combining their villainy into an organized team. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 tried to set it up, only for the film’s sequel to fizzle out amid poor reactions and the lingering damage of the hack. As Spider-Man: Homecoming took off a whole new era for the character, those plans always lingered in some form. But for Drew Goddard, who was at one point tasked with bringing these villainous characters to life, his vision of the team died with that 2014 breach.
“I had a big Spider-Man movie about the Sinister Six go down because of the Sony hack,” Goddard recently reflected in an interview with Variety. “My office was right on the lot, and I saw the FBI swarm in and the helicopters fly over the studio. I was sad about it, but there was literally nothing I could do to change the course of events. I suppose it was better than if they hadn’t liked the script.”
For Goddard, at least, things look very different. He’s written the adaptation of Project Hail Mary, one of the most anticipated films of the year. He’s facing the unenviable task of making a fifth Matrix movie in the wake of the Wachowskis’ departure from the franchise, seemingly for good.
And they look very different for Sony, too. Despite the massive success of Tom Holland’s Spider-Man era, set to expand with Brand New Day this summer, as well as the separate animated saga of Miles Morales in the Spider-Verse movies, the studio’s attempts to craft a connected universe out of random Spider-Man-adjacent characters (remember when it was called SPUMC?) to fashion some form of Sinister Six, even with increasingly weirder character options, have been largely unsuccessful. While Venom managed to carve out a successfully silly trilogy of films, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven all fizzled out spectacularly at the box office and among critical consensus (in this writer’s eye, of course, Madame Web remains innocent).
Now that the studio has recently indicated that it wants to try to reboot its ideas for a largely Spider-Man-less Spider-Man Shared Universe, could the Sinister Six attempt to rise again? Time will tell, but clearly, for better or worse, it’s an idea Sony is as obsessed with as J. Jonah Jameson is with pictures of Spider-Man.
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