Sony's efforts feel very early 2000's. They have the same texture as Tobey's run as Spider-Man. And the characters themselves don't have much going for themselves outside of the secondhand shine they catch from Spider-Man. They either need to bring in the star of the show or they need to drastically recalibrate where they are aiming, quality wise.
Or, you know, just hire good writers, shocking, I know.
You're not wrong but "just hire good writers" is akin to saying that a professional sports team should "just get better athletes"
Like yes that's obviously the solution but at the same time there's really no "Gooder <person at job> Emporium" that someone can just walk into and then hey there ya go it's all better.
But given the number of dumpster fires that Sony has shat out in the last decade I'm also not convinced it's writers that are the problem rather than Sony just being
really bad at this.
Sony's the one hiring the writers (and everyone else) though. Could probably do a comedy skit about the whole "Gooder <person at job> Emporium" thing in Hollywood though, with the heaps of people looking to get into the business who end up working, or spending their days writing screenplays, at Starbucks or whatever.
Finding and hiring good people can be difficult, but if you look at a lot of the people getting writing/directing jobs in Hollywood, it's pretty clear that they're not getting gigs based on the quality of their output. It's the 'good/punctual/friendly, pick two' thing, except the list also includes 'fun at parties, knows where the bodies are buried, has the good coke', but it's still only pick two.
The sports team analogy also fails because 100% of those teams succeed at the task of "playing a good game of baseball (or whatever)", they're just locked in a ruthless giant tournament where only one team can win the World Series and they may appear to suck relative to the literal best in the world collection of individuals, but each team is still full of world class talent performing at an incredible level.
If movie studios were staffed to the same standards then every movie would be incredibly good but some just don't have a chance of winning Best Picture.
Obviously it's easier to measure the quality of an athlete with actual numbers, and it may be contentious to determine the "on base percentage" of a writer or director, especially when a film is such a large collaborative effort.
But when some people are always associated with garbage movies and some people routinely turn out hits I feel like some bare bones rankings can be made, and I'm shocked if the corporate overlords looking to making millions if not billions of dollars would allow "is nice and meets deadlines but produces crap" to stay employed when they're literally losing a fortune.
I feel like they must truly not see any connection between who's producing the work and the end product and so e.g. Scott Buck gets to run a shocking numbers of TV shows into the ground. This is really baffling to me as no other business with this much money at stake would be so cavalier with complete project failures.