It’s time to say goodbye to the SUMC superhero film series. Just a few days before the release of Kraven the Hunter, Sony Pictures announced that the film would mark the end of the SUMC comic spin-off series, which chronicles the adventures of various villains and supporting characters from the Spider-Man comic – wait. WAIT A MINUTE. I’m sorry. What?! Never heard of the SUMC franchise? You weren’t even remotely aware that such a thing as the Sony Universe of Marvel characters even existed? So. SUMCs to be you.

The best way to understand SUMC is that it was an almost certainly sadistic experiment in which moviegoers served as guinea pigs. The experiment was intended to test how great the demand for superhero films is. And the way Sony tested that demand was by producing six astonishingly bad films, films that are so consistently and profoundly terrible that it’s almost impressive – as if the filmmakers must be some kind of reverse genius or incredible Unlucky enough for them to make it out come out so shitty. Not only were most of these films truly terrible, half of them revolved around characters that no one cared about at all, and without the comic context or character connections that could have made them interesting on the page.

Morbius, Madam WebAnd Kraven the Hunter were all based on recurring supporting characters from the Spider-Man comics and were thrown into the franchise’s salad bowl due to decades-long IP rights issues. Spider-Man is a superhero from Marvel Comics. But even though Marvel, now owned by Disney, has spent nearly two decades making its own films based on its superhero characters via the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), the rights to Spider-Man and a number of related films have long been owned by Sony.

To further complicate matters, Spider-Man has appeared in a number of MCU-related films – but only as part of an IP sharing deal between Marvel Studios and Sony. And Sony, given the incredible success of the MCU, decided to try their luck at building a (mostly somehow) separate cinematic universe with the MCU other Characters it controlled thanks to the Spider-Man licensing deal – hence films based on Spidey villains like Venom, Morbius and, yes, Kraven.

The problem, just from a storytelling perspective, is that in the comics, all of these characters are defined by their relationship to Spider-Man. Venom is a comically dark inversion of the hero, almost literally Spider-Man in the negative. Morbius is a tortured reflection of Spider-Man’s nerdy science side. And Kraven is an animalistic super-hunter with a killer-friendly moral code that’s almost the exact opposite of Spider-Man’s. Each of these characters illuminated a specific aspect of Spider-Man’s psyche and challenged his worldview. They were foils designed to push the limits of the webslinger.

Sony’s big idea was to make a whole series of films about these characters – but without Spider-Man.

On the one hand, you can see why: in 2018 Poison made lot of money. In 2019 jokera solo film based on the DC Comics Batman villain, earned even more money. Maybe audiences would watch literally any comic book movie reminiscent of a comic book. Maybe the studios just needed to say this: IIt’s time for Morbin, and then a billion dollars would appear on their balance sheets.

On the other hand, this was obviously an incredibly stupid idea. And somehow the execution made everything worse. Of the six films that make up the SUMC, only the second and third “Venom” films are somewhat tolerable, and even then only as knowing douchebag camp, not as truly good films. Morbius is an ugly, turgid misfire that is mostly remembered for the fake catchphrase that online memesters invented for the title character. Madam Weba Spider-Man spin-off that not only features Spider-Man but hardly any superheroes at all might actually be the worst movie I’ve ever seen in the theater.

Kraven the Hunter is, on the whole, slightly better than the latter two films, but only in the sense that life-threatening pneumonia is, on the whole, better than stage five cancer. The fact that it’s a little better is largely thanks to two people: Russell Crowe, who growls and grunts his way through the film as the title character’s Russian mafia boss father, and director JC Chandor, the filmmaker behind the solidly entertaining film Triple limit and the subtle and excellent financial drama margin call.

Kraven the Hunter is neither subtle nor distinguished. But every now and then you almost feel that it’s a real film – a film about something, a film with an idea. But like its Spider-Man spin-off predecessors, it’s overwhelmed by hideous scripts, crude acting, choppy editing and garish digital effects.

If even a consistently solid filmmaker like Chandor can’t turn this silly superhero spin-off concept into a half-decent film, then it’s probably time to abandon the idea. Sony’s experiment failed.

It’s a shame that this $110 million mess was clearly intended to spawn its own sequels, as a new villain fully reveals himself in the film’s final minutes. The franchise never took off, and production costs totaled about half a billion Paraphrase my friend Sonny BunchSUMC costs. Goodbye and get well soon, from the worst superhero franchise of the last thirty years.