The lights were on, but nobody came. At Brazil’s prestigious Comic Con Experience (CCXP) on Sunday, Sony Pictures’ surprise panel for “Kraven the Hunter” — the studio’s latest non-Spider-Man Marvel movie — played to rows of empty seats, according to an individual in attendance. There were no stars, and not that many fans. Just silence where superhero hype should have been.
The half-empty panel presentation of a $110 million budgeted antihero movie at one of the world’s largest pop culture events reflected the Sony Marvel franchise’s diminishing profile outside the mainline “Spider-Man” movies starring Tom Holland and “Venom” trilogy. While “Venom: The Last Dance” launched on more than 4,000 movie screens in October, “Kraven the Hunter” will debut this Friday in just 3,000 — a stark 25% reduction that could signal waning confidence in Sony’s failed Marvel experiment.