Palak Patel, who managed Sony Pictures’ Marvel movies under Columbia Pictures, is leaving the studio, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
He’s taking on a new role as Chief Content Officer at Prime Focus Studios, which is part of DNEG, a company known for visual effects. It’s not clear if his exit from Sony is linked to the poor performance of some Marvel movies he worked on, which didn’t do well with critics or audiences.
Palak Patel spent nearly ten years working with Sony and Columbia Pictures. During his time there, he oversaw movies like Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Venom: The Last Dance, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter. While the Venom series made good money, each movie earned less than the one before and got bad reviews.
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The other three spin-offs Patel worked on turned out to be some of Sony’s biggest box office failures. Interestingly, reports say Patel was the main contact at the studio for the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies, which were made in partnership with Marvel Studios.
Related: The Academy Says That ‘MADAME WEB’ Is Not Eligible To Be Nominated For Best Picture At The Oscars
Since Marvel Studios couldn’t use some characters and may have been pressured to include Venom in Spider-Man: No Way Home, Patel leaving Sony might actually help Kevin Feige and his team as they prepare for a new Spider-Man trilogy. Palak Patel expressed his excitement about the partnership between Prime Focus Studios and DNEG. He said,
Prime Focus Studios and DNEG joining forces as one company to offer full studio capabilities is game-changing – from acquiring IP, to developing scripts, to assisting filmmakers maximize their creativity while minimizing financial risk – with all the resources provided, from our state-of-the-art soundstages to utilizing DNEG’s artists early in the development process to deliver across all formats and genres.
Meanwhile, Sony’s outgoing CEO Tony Vinciquerra seems to be making excuses for the studio’s Marvel failures. He recently blamed critics for the poor performance of those movies instead of addressing their flaws.
Tony Vinciquerra admitted that Kraven the Hunter had “probably the worst launch we had in the 7 1/2 years I’ve been at Sony.” He added, “That didn’t work out very well, which I still don’t understand, because the film is not a bad film.”
Talking about Madame Web, Vinciquerra said,
Madame Web underperformed in theaters because the press just crucified it. It was not a bad film, and it did great on Netflix.
For some reason, the press decided they didn’t want us making these films like Kraven and Madame Web, and the critics just destroyed them. They also did it with Venom, but the audience loved Venom and made it a massive hit. These are not terrible films. They were just destroyed by the critics in the press, for some reason.
He continued,
For now, it seems like Sony has paused its Marvel Universe projects. The studio is shifting its attention to working with Marvel Studios, along with focusing on Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse and Spider-Noir.