‘Movies Aren’t Dead After All’: Sony Pictures Boss Tom Rothman on Historic ‘Spider-Man’ Box Office and Losing Tarantino’s Cliff Booth Sequel to Netflix

Some key takeaways from this interview:

• The SSU films are no longer in development.
• "Cliff Booth" is at Netflix because director David Fincher has an exclusive deal with Netflix.

The “Venom” trilogy was huge, but other spinoffs like “Kraven the Hunter” and “Madame Web” were misfires. Why didn’t those work?

Ultimately, the audience wasn’t satisfied enough with them. Whether that’s a fair assessment of those movies, who knows. That’s howling into the wind. The audience is the boss, and they didn’t respond. It’s as simple as that.

Are there plans to keep developing Sony’s universe of Marvel characters?

Right now, we don’t know. We never looked at it as the “Sony-Marvel Universe.” We looked at if there were worthwhile movies to make with other characters. At the moment, there are none in active development.

[...]

Why is Netflix releasing “Cliff Booth,” the sequel to Sony’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”?

Because David Fincher is exclusive to Netflix. We were going to make the movie when Quentin [Tarantino] was directing it, but he decided that he didn’t want to do it and changed course. The only other person that he was comfortable directing his script was David Fincher, and David Fincher was exclusive to Netflix, so we were not going to stand in anybody’s way.