The Sony Marvel Universe

Welcome to the Dadnology HQ for the Sony Marvel Universe — the strangest, most fascinating corner of superhero cinema. This is the one studio that fired the starting gun on the modern comic-book movie with Sam Raimi's Spider-Man (2002), then spent the next two decades building an entire universe around Spider-Man's villains while not actually owning the rights to put Spider-Man in most of it.

The rights dilemma, explained for the family movie night: Back in the 1990s, a near-bankrupt Marvel sold the film rights to its biggest characters piece by piece. Sony bought Spider-Man and his entire roster of associated characters — over 900 of them — and never let go. That is why Spidey lived at Sony for 20 years while the Avengers grew up at Disney. The modern compromise: Marvel Studios "borrows" Spider-Man for the MCU films (Homecoming onward), but the character legally still lives at Sony. Two studios, one wall-crawler, a shared-custody agreement that somehow works.

Why the four Tom Holland MCU films are on this page too: Homecoming, Far From Home, No Way Home and Brand New Day are Marvel Studios productions, but Spider-Man himself never left Sony's ownership — same shared-custody deal explained above. So his complete filmography belongs here, MCU entries included. All four are tagged MCU (On Loan) in the ranking table below, kept clearly apart from the true non-MCU Sony universe (Raimi, Webb, the SSU, Spider-Verse) this hub otherwise exists to track.

The "Spidey-less" universe: Sony's current live-action project — the SSU (Sony's Spider-Man Universe) — is the genuinely bizarre part. It builds movies around Venom, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven without Spider-Man himself appearing. Important context that gets missed: this only became "Spidey-less" once Marvel started using Spider-Man in the MCU. The old Sony Spider-Man films (Raimi 2002-2007, Webb 2012-2014) absolutely had Spider-Man front and centre — they are the foundation everything else stands on.

The multiverse bridges: Even though the SSU doesn't share a continuity with the MCU, the worlds keep colliding. The post-credit scenes of Venom: Let There Be Carnage and Morbius, and the multiverse blowout of Spider-Man: No Way Home, stitched these timelines together after the fact — turning the old Raimi and Webb films into "alternate universes" that suddenly matter again.

The quality here swings violently — from Oscar-winning masterpieces (Spider-Verse) to meme-tier misfires (Morbius, Madame Web). That is the red thread of this hub: genius and madness, often in the same calendar year. We rank all of it honestly, the way a dad who grew up on these films actually would.