Silver and Black

I don't believe that to be true; these are characters, not accessories. The only reason I could think you'd be reluctant to remove spider-man from them is brand convention.

But I don't know of any reason why a reporter infected with a malevolent intelligent parasite, or a young woman with a cat burgler alter ego can't be movie protagonists.

Sadly they are supporting chatacters in Spider Man's world either as allies or enemies.

Mileena Madness

Yes, but they don't have to be? Especially not in an adaptation?

Silver Sable, especially, could probably handle a movie on her own. She's a supermercenary, leader of a whole team of supermercenaries, who go into battle against superhumans and conspiracies and sometimes heroes and all that jazz: she's not specifically a Spider-Man character and has branched out quite a bit, and she and/or the Wild Pack in general has had a few stories that they've carried themselves over the years. A movie with her would essentially be The Expendables with superheroes, which sounds all right.

Black Cat... depends. Unlike Sable, Black Cat as a character has never really branched out away from being a Spider-mythos character, at least not successfully. She's by and large a Satellite Character to Spider-Man, and without the superhero connection brought by Peter there isn't much to her beyond being a discount Catwoman (Catwoman herself having her own submythos, distinct persona and supporting cast that could probably carry a movie just fine, provided it's not made by the utter idiots who made her earlier film).

Black Cat needs someone with a strong personality to play off of in order to work, at least provided they don't just completely revamp the character, which is why I thought pairing her with Sable in the first place was a good idea. For a solo movie, I would have at least done Sable first and not started with Cat.

Edited by KnownUnknown on Aug 11th 2018 at 10:54:44 AM

"The difference between reality and fiction is that fiction has to make sense." - Tom Clancy, paraphrasing Mark Twain.

According to Screen Rant, Sony "still has plans" for this movie.

Reminder that Venom made $855m at the box office.

I wouldn't be too quick to predict these films will bomb without Spider-Man.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 25th 2019 at 6:56:57 AM

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Reminder that most non-comic reading people probably know Venom as "Spider-Man's evil twin brother."

How many of those people would know about Silver Sable or Black Cat? Or Morbius?

How many of them knew who Rocket Raccoon was before he starred in a hit blockbuster film?

If anything, the obscurity works to their benefit. The main source of detractors for the Venom film were Spider-Man fans going, "VENOM DOESN'T WORK WITHOUT SPIDER-MAN!!! THIS MOVIE SUCKS BECAUSE THERE'S NO SPIDER-MAN!!!" People who had no idea they were supposed to hate the movie for not having Spider-Man in it wound up enjoying the movie on its own merits.

They don't know who Silver Sable is? Good. That means they won't be thinking about how mad they are that Spider-Man isn't in her movie and will instead treat the film as its own entity.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 25th 2019 at 8:44:09 AM

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The main source of detractors for the Venom film was people thinking it looked horrible, which it did turn out to be.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

Looked good enough to make $855m.

Critics trashed the film, mind you, but the main objection that comes up in a lot of the negative reviews: not enough Spider-Man. End of the day, Venom managed to be a very successful standalone superhero film despite all the "WHERE'S MAH SPIDER-MAN" whining clouding up the dialogue.

A film made to the same standard of quality but with less Spider-wangsting Hatedom has a fair shot of being every bit as success. Thus, as I said, the obscurity actually works to these characters' favor. Sony wants these films to be taken on their own merits and not as Spider-Man movies, so the less people think of Spider-Man when they hear these characters' names, the better.

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...Touché.

I guess the fear lies in the execution not meeting the MCU standard. Yeah, Venom performed great financially, but it isn't a critical darling like the majority of MCU movies.

Hence why Feige and Marvel Studios in general aren't buttering up Venom or the rest of the SUMC. Because they know Sony doesn't care about the critics and are more interested in getting butts onto movie seats. Which is very unwise.

Besides, isn't Black Cat appearing in Far From Home anyway?

I've read a lot of objections to the film and that wasn't really one of them. The big one was that the film wasn't as wild as it should have been. Also: "Like a turd in the wind."

This idea that the central, defining aspect of all discourse about Venom was "where's spider-man" is a strange thesis you've clung to since the film's release, but I've said and continue to say you're trying to frame a narrative where one doesn't exist. Hell, I'd be more inclined to say the spider-man connection helped Venom (as the character's relatively well-known connection to Spider-Man may have misled/deluded some people into thinking this was connected to the MCU Spider-Man).

I do agree with you Silver Sable and Black Cat have a fairly solid chance of standing on their own, particularly given their characters are actually less reliant on spidey than Venom. The question is whether they can lead to anything that stands out in the current market to have some success or if it'll be drowned by everything else, because Venom is a questionable example to follow, despite its success.

What Venom's box office success was lightning in a bottle in the form of a So Bad, It's Good film. Most of its audience (and positive reviews), from what I've seen, seem to have come from people amused by the all the kookyness and unintentional romantic comedy between Eddie and the symbiote. As I said, lightning in a bottle. Caused by sheer incompetence leading to a s ort of Springtime for Hitler scenario. This is a very unstable and dangerous ground to build a franchise upon and we'll have to see whether this model has any legs to sustain itself upon.

To put it simply: Venom's success was built on So Bad, It's Good and a bizarre accidental romantic comedy. It was a masterpiece of accident. How is Sony going to replicate something brought upon by happenstance and incompetence? Trying to make every subsequent film So Bad, It's Good is a formula for disaster.

Morbius and Silver and Black have the tall task of following the wave of a film that succeeded effectively on accident. They could make Silver and Black simply a fun, by the numbers blockbuster film but that doesn't always work (see the crash-and-burn of MIB International). Are they going to ape the kookyness of Venom and try to make a sort of cheesy romantic comedy? It's possible.

Basically this entire cinematic universe is built on sand.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

If so, then the Dark Universe was built on air.

"Where's Spider-Man?" is a complaint that's dogged the film since before we even had the unpopular teaser for it. Pretty much from the moment the movie was announced, there has been an effort to frame it as a guaranteed failure because Spider-Man isn't in it and "You can't do Venom without Spider-Man".

"Where's Spider-Man?" is so ingrained in the conversation surrounding the film that it even made it into the Rotten Tomatoes critic summary.

People can't stop complaining about the lack of Spider-Man. That's been the big complaint ever since the movie was announced. If you haven't noticed it, I don't know what to tell you given that the same conversation is happening on this very page surrounding Silver and Black - another film we know literally nothing about beyond the absence of Spider-Man. Like Venom, people are more than happy to doomsay the movie on that alone.

And just one page back, we had these comments:

But at the end of the day, Venom didn't bomb. Despite Spider-Man's absence, it has 81% audience score out of 38,399 ratings and made $855m at the box office. It's not a critical darling but it's a popular film that raked in huge amounts of money. The film proved that yes, Venom and other such characters can work just fine without Spider-Man.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 25th 2019 at 11:09:03 AM

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You're taking one fairly minor factor and blowing it out of proportion in an attempt to make it the sole guiding narrative of Venom's story for reasons that are still unclear to me. No one ever said people weren't going "where's spider-man", but you seem to believe that was the one and only factor on people's minds about Venom or this. In fact, if you scroll down in the Rotten Tomatoes, you'll see the actual reviews, few of which even mention Spider-Man and instead all talk about the fact the movie's a trainwreck. The few that mention Spider-Man are more bummed that Hardy's venom has such a tenuous connection to the source material.

E.g, in the critic reviews:

Audience reviews:

Which segues onto the fact you missed a key point that RT's consensus and its mention of Spider-Man is that many reviews talked about how this film was a relic of the pre-MCU days of cheesy superheroes of the late 90's and early 00's, ergo it could use a stronger connection to Spider-Man (i.e the MCU).

You also seem to dismiss the questioning of "maybe this doesn't work without Spider-Man" completely out of hand as silly Hatedom, given it is a perfectly reasonable question to ask for characters defined by him (such as Venom, whose hatred of Spider-Man is a fairly major aspect of his character) or, as the case may be, Silver Sable and Black Cat who have most of their history tied down to Spidey and thus have a lot less to draw from as headliners and solo figures.

If you read our Venom thread from the beginning, for one, almost everyone (including both you and me, so I don't know how this seems to be escaping you) was complaining that the film looked (and proved) to be a trainwreck, not whinging about where is Spider-Man.

Even this concept that the Venom movie proves Venom is a unquestionable leading man if removed from spidey is questionable, given that this version of Eddie Brock is more or less entirely removed from his comic self except for his profession and name. Did it really prove Venom "could stand on its own" when it removed most of what made him Venom and succeeded entirely on being so incompetently made it became a accidental romantic comedy?

Whether some people were discussing if Venom needed Spider-Man is something I honestly don't think is anywhere near as relevant as you are making it out to be, and nowhere near as relevant as the other questions posed by this new cinematic universe and Venom. For me, you constantly trying to make everything about "this proves spider-man's supporting cast is leading man material" just kills most of the debates by simplifying the narrative.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

I'll stop talking about it when people stop holding the lack of Spider-Man against Sony's cinematic universe. Simple as that.

You can claim this is a non-issue all you want, but here is the post that started this topic.

That post exists. It's right there on the last page, and it's saying that Venom doesn't work without Spider-Man.

You are attacking me for responding to an actual argument raised by an actual person in this actual thread. Yes, people do hold the lack of Spider-Man against the film. It just happened right here in this thread, and it's the entire reason why we're talking about this.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 25th 2019 at 1:35:18 PM

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Tobias — nobody is saying that there aren't people who complain about the lack of Spider-Man. What they are saying is that, in general, a lot of the complaints about Venom were about the movie itself and not the lack of Spider-Man in the movie.

Watch the movie. Is it a good movie? No. In fact, it's fairly bad. But it's bad in an entertaining way, which is why it grossed a lot of money. But the movie is bad not because of the lack of Spider-Man, it's bad because it's just bad.

I have actually seen the movie, thank you. Anecdotal evidence, but I even know a casual moviegoer who is not a comic reader, had no idea it was connected to Spider-Man, and said it was the best superhero movie they'd ever seen. This person is easy to impress, mind you. But a lot of Americans are.

All I'm saying is that "Venom will fail because Spider-Man isn't in it" was a bad argument then, and "Silver and Black will fail because Spider-Man isn't in it" is a bad argument now. These movies do not rise and fall with Spider-Man.

And also that $855m at the box office does not constitute a failure.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 25th 2019 at 1:44:28 PM

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I mean...Spidey IS the reason Venom has a big white spider on his chest and has eyepieces evoking Spider-Man's.

Yeah, but Venom got that much not because it earned it, but by accident because people treated it like it was The Room in a "you have to see it to see how dumb it is" way. And it's looking like Sony was like "hey, we're not complaining! Let's move forward with our cinematic universe!"

Far From Home is literally around the corner and we've gotten nothing but radio silence regarding Morbius. For all we know, FFH will print money, which will cause Sony to be all "eh, do we NEED our own Cinematic Universe if it doesn't have Spidey?"

In any case, maybe we need to calm down for a few weeks at least...

Edited by TargetmasterJoe on Jun 25th 2019 at 3:49:58 PM

I think you are getting a wee bit defensive now. Nobody is saying Venom failed. Far from it. They are saying that the movie wasn't good and the reason it wasn't good had nothing to do with the lack of Spider-Man.

Now, are there people who complain about the lack of Spider-Man in these movies? Yes. But look at the reviews of the film. Notice all of the complaints the reviewers had that never mention Spider-Man. This is because they are looking at the movie as is and complaining out it as they see it, not as they want it to be.

Read AVClub's review of the film. Even though it mentions Spider-Man, it never dings the movie for not having Spider-Man in it — it has plenty of other things to ding the movie about.

Also, and I will keep pointing out how stupid this line is, "Like a turd in the wind."

Edited by alliterator on Jun 25th 2019 at 12:51:12 PM

I definitely think you're getting a bit defensive. I never attacked you to the best of my knowledge (I actually fairly enjoy you in most other threads).

"All you Fascists bound to lose."

I'm not arguing with you about Venom's quality. Venom's quality is irrelevant to the topic.

On the last page, Kostya said that Black Cat and Silver Sable's film or films will flop because, like Venom, they cannot work without Spider-Man. I was responding to that. You're trying to tell me that nobody's saying what Kostya literally just said.

That happened. It actually did happen. It's what I responded to. And you guys are blowing it completely out of proportion and trying to turn it into a dissertation on Venom's pros and cons as a film, when all this conversation was about is whether or not Spider-Man's absence makes these films incapable of succeeding.

I'm a little frustrated, yes, because y'all are shifting the goalposts on a point you aren't even interested in discussing. I've made my point and now I'm done.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jun 25th 2019 at 1:59:48 PM

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My last post had this line in it: Right now, you just appear to ignoring what we are actually writing in favor of arguments you assume we're making.

You're previous post had:

But we, in fact, quoted and linked to reviews that looked at Venom as a film and never dinged it for lack of Spider-Man, thus proving you wrong. Again: there are some who complain about lack of Spider-Man, but overall, Venom got bad reviews because it wasn't a good film.

Edited by alliterator on Jun 25th 2019 at 1:01:59 AM

Well, Tobias has voiced his unwillingness to engage with us, so I guess that's done now.

"All you Fascists bound to lose."