{"id":486580,"date":"2026-03-20T22:26:13","date_gmt":"2026-03-20T22:26:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/486580\/"},"modified":"2026-03-20T22:26:13","modified_gmt":"2026-03-20T22:26:13","slug":"drew-goddard-says-the-sony-hack-killed-his-sinister-six-movie","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/486580\/","title":{"rendered":"Drew Goddard Says the Sony Hack Killed His ‘Sinister Six’ Movie"},"content":{"rendered":"

The 2014 Sony hack<\/a> is one of the biggest information breaches in corporate history\u2014and one that was ultimately hugely important to the cinematic legacy of Spider-Man. Across thousands and thousands of emails, a picture began to emerge of Sony\u2019s increasing floundering over how to approach its ownership of one of the most popular comic book characters of all time, the potential for an ascendant Marvel Studios<\/a> to come in and offer a helping hand, and, of course, many (many) plans and attempts at spinning Spider-Man off into his own cinematic universe.<\/p>\n

For a very long time, most of that plan centered on the Sinister Six<\/a>\u2014six of Spidey\u2019s rogues, usually spearheaded by Doc Ock, combining their villainy into an organized team.\u00a0The Amazing Spider-Man 2<\/a> tried to set it up, only for the film\u2019s sequel to fizzle out<\/a> amid poor reactions and the lingering damage of the hack. As\u00a0Spider-Man: Homecoming took off a whole new era for the character, those plans always lingered in some form. But for Drew Goddard, who was at one point tasked with bringing these villainous characters to life, his vision of the team died with that 2014 breach.<\/p>\n

\u201cI had a big Spider-Man movie about the Sinister Six go down because of the Sony hack,\u201d Goddard recently reflected in an interview with Variety<\/a>. \u201cMy office was right on the lot, and I saw the FBI swarm in and the helicopters fly over the studio. I was sad about it, but there was literally nothing I could do to change the course of events. I suppose it was better than if they hadn\u2019t liked the script.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Goddard, at least, things look very different. He\u2019s written the adaptation<\/a> of\u00a0Project Hail Mary, one of the most anticipated films of the year. He\u2019s facing the unenviable task of making a fifth\u00a0Matrix movie<\/a> in the wake of the Wachowskis\u2019 departure from the franchise, seemingly for good.<\/p>\n

And they look very different for Sony, too. Despite the massive success of Tom Holland\u2019s Spider-Man era, set to expand with\u00a0Brand New Day<\/a> this summer, as well as the separate animated saga of Miles Morales in the\u00a0Spider-Verse movies, the studio\u2019s attempts to craft a connected universe out of random Spider-Man-adjacent characters (remember when it was called SPUMC<\/a>?) to fashion some form of Sinister Six, even with increasingly weirder character options, have been largely unsuccessful. While Venom managed to carve out a successfully silly trilogy of films, Morbius,\u00a0Madame Web, and\u00a0Kraven\u00a0all fizzled out spectacularly at the box office and among critical consensus (in this writer\u2019s eye, of course, Madame Web remains innocent<\/a>).<\/p>\n

Now that the studio has recently indicated<\/a> that it wants to try to reboot its ideas for a largely Spider-Man-less Spider-Man Shared Universe, could the Sinister Six attempt to rise again? Time will tell, but clearly, for better or worse, it\u2019s an idea Sony is as obsessed with<\/a> as J. Jonah Jameson is with pictures of Spider-Man.<\/p>\n

Want more io9 news? Check out when to expect the latest Marvel<\/a>, Star Wars<\/a>, and Star Trek<\/a> releases, what\u2019s next for the DC Universe on film and TV<\/a>, and everything you need to know about the future of Doctor Who<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The 2014 Sony hack is one of the biggest information breaches in corporate history\u2014and one that was ultimately…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":486581,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[171995,96,2839,172448,622,22502,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-486580","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-drew-goddard","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-sinister-six","tag-sony","tag-spider-man","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486580","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486580"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486580\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/486581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486580"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486580"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486580"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}