Towards the end of Sony Picture’s latest Marvel film “Kraven the Hunter,” the titular antihero – played with maximum abs by Aaron Taylor-Johnson – experiences a creepy hallucination in which he is surrounded by a horde of spiders. It’s a clear reference to the character’s greatest nemesis in Marvel Comics, Spider-Man.

It’s also almost certainly the closest the character (or at least Taylor-Johnson’s version of him) comes to confronting the web-slinger.

“Kraven” is expected to have one of the lowest opening weekends ever for a Marvel superhero film. This makes it Sony Pictures’ third unsuccessful attempt to spin off a secondary Spider-Man character into its own film franchise, following 2022’s “Morbius” with Jared Leto and “Madame Web” last February with Dakota Johnson. The impending failure at the box office almost certainly spells the end of this studio venture, which one knowledgeable insider at Sony attributed to an industry-wide “irrational exuberance about superheroes” that has ultimately led to the genre’s overall leading-edge preeminence declining power at the box office.

What it doesn’t mean, however, is the end of Sony’s Marvel Universe.

For one thing, technically there never really was a Sony Marvel Universe or a Sony Spider-Man Universe or any other official designation that resembled the Marvel Cinematic Universe or the rebooted DC Universe. Sony has never approached its comic book adaptations with such deliberate narrative cohesion, as evidenced by the studio’s casual, lowercase, and rhetorically clumsy wording for its superhero films: Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters.

On the other hand, Sony continues to invest heavily in the production of films about Spider-Man, the popular Marvel character who ushered in the current era of superhero cinema with 2002’s “Spider-Man.” The fourth Spider-Man film starring Tom Holland is expected to begin filming in 2025 in collaboration with Marvel Studios (more on that later); the animated film “Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse” is in production and will conclude the Oscar-winning trilogy about Miles Morales; and Sony is producing a live-action Spider-Man Noir series starring Nicolas Cage for Amazon Prime Video.

Sony insiders also vehemently defend the success of the three “Venom” films starring Tom Hardy, which grossed more than $1.8 billion worldwide. The latest film, “Venom: The Last Dance,” posted the franchise’s lowest box office total to date ($473 million), especially when compared to the $856 million worldwide gross of 2018’s “Venom.” But “The Last Dance” cost $120 million — small money for a superhero movie — surpassing the international box office of that year’s “Venom: Let There Be Carnage.” 2021. So there’s really no financial reason for Sony to stop making Venom movies any time soon.

But “Venom” — which centers on a widely popular character who has had a profound impact on culture — also gave Sony the false impression that audiences would flock to a film about any Spider-Man character without Spider-Man seen in the film.

“All these characters are famous Because They went up against Spider-Man,” says Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock. “Unfortunately for Sony, they had a taste of success with ‘Venom,’ and that kind of spoiled everything for them because they thought they could just spin off all of these characters. I don’t think they realized that Venom could lead a franchise while these other characters couldn’t. The fact that Spider-Man wasn’t in these films was the fatal mistake.”

Sony is far from alone in aggressively expanding its superhero portfolio in the late 2010s, only to face a sharp decline in both quality and audience interest in the 2020s. But the studio found itself in a unique quandary: the unprecedented deal between the studio and Disney’s Marvel Studios to share Spider-Man in the MCU, starting with 2016’s “Captain America: Civil War” and 2017’s “Spiderman.” Man: Homecoming.” The partnership – in which Marvel Studios boss Kevin Feige and former Sony Pictures boss Amy Pascal produced the Tom Holland-led Spidey films for Sony Pictures produce – was extremely lucrative for Sony with worldwide revenues of over $3.9 billion. But it also excluded Dutchman Peter Parker from any Sony projects are not officially part of the MCU.

“When studios try to work together, the business complications are really difficult,” says a top executive with extensive experience in the superhero space. “Sony has no flexibility. They have a cage to work in and they just try to make one good film after another.”

According to a Sony source, the deal with Disney never stopped Sony from using Spider-Man in its films that did not bear his name; The abundance of Peter Parkers, Gwen Stacys, and other various Spider-People in the Spider-Verse films certainly confirms this. But there was a feeling around the studio that audiences wouldn’t accept Holland’s Spidey suddenly appearing in a live-action film that wasn’t part of the MCU, especially after Spider-Man: No Way Home and Marvel Studios Projects “Loki” and “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness” set the final boundaries for the Marvel Multiverse.

This appears to have had the biggest impact on “Morbius,” which was originally scheduled to premiere in July 2020, long before “No Way Home” and “Doctor Strange 2,” but opened after them due to the pandemic. The delay forced Sony to reshoot to take into account that Michael Keaton’s Adrian Toomes, introduced as part of the MCU in Homecoming, could be in the same room as Leto’s titular living vampire, a character who does not appear in the MCU – a Funny imagination that didn’t seem like a big deal until the multiverse suddenly made it one.

Dancing around Spider-Man without ever using him also contributed to the feeling that these spin-off films were merely exercises in, er, cowardly opportunism. “You can feel the cynicism from far away,” says a veteran producer. “They grind up produce and it feels like this. There is no quality control.”

Privately, Sony insiders admit that “Kraven,” “Madame Web” and “Morbius” are creative and critical types (though they also insist that “Morbius,” which grossed $167.4 million worldwide, actually is made a profit). They say the studio will need to be more discerning in the future when it comes to which, if any, of the studio’s Spider-Man characters should be included in their own film franchise.

There is also another option. “You could hire another Spider-Man,” Bock says. “It doesn’t have to be Tom.”