The ongoing deal between Marvel and Sony to share the film rights to Spider-Man yielded three very good Tom Holland movies — and doomed pretty much all of Sony’s Spider-Man “spinoff” films to a pointless existence. Because Holland’s Peter Parker lives in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he can’t exist in the same universe as the likes of Venom, Morbius, and Madame Web, which leaves their films to subsist on the scraps of Marvel lore deemed too inconsequential to use in more important projects.

Why make a Venom movie (much less three of them) if the character will never get to meet Spider-Man? Beyond the fact that it is sort of fun to see Tom Hardy act like a weirdo, I don’t think Sony ever came up with a satisfying answer to that question.

Full review at ScreenCrush.