Spider-Man is a Marvel character, that much is not in question. Created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Spidey has appeared in Marvel comics since the early 60’s. Spider-Man is technically even an Avenger! He was offered entry to the group a few times but didn’t actually join up until later. Marvel Comics offer a rich history of Spider-Man interacting with The Avengers, and comic fans have been clamoring for the web-crawler to appear in the newest slate of Marvel super-hero movies, pointing specifically to The Avengers 3 as a great point of entry. There’s only one problem with that: Sony owns the movie rights to Spider-Man. They’ve trotted out Spider-Man movies every few years – the second movie in the most recently rebooted series, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 met with mixed reviews – in order to retain that license. It turns out, Sony and Marvel have discussed the possibility of a Spider-Man crossover, but nothing has come of those discussions.
One of the results of Sony’s recent troubles with the GOP (not THAT GOP…) have been the release of internal e-mails and memos from Sony Brass. As recently as October 30th, e-mails were exchanged between Marvel and Sony about a possible reunion between Spider-Man and the rest of the Marvel universe. It seems that those talks broke down without any forward movement, and Sony has decided to forge ahead on their own.
There are a few things that I don’t understand about this… Sony obviously wants to cling to the Spider-Man movie license for as long as possible. They’ll keep rolling out mediocre movies as often as they have to in order to prevent the movie rights from lapsing. If they agreed to loan the Spider-Man character to Marvel, they could make STUPID AMOUNTS OF MONEY… sticky, wet piles of cash… The first Avengers movie made a tidy gross of $1,518,594,910 worldwide… That’s 1.5 billion – with a ‘b’ – dollars. The upcoming sequel – Age of Ultron – might just top that. Are you really telling me that Sony wouldn’t want a piece of that hot box-office action? The Amazing Spider-Man 2 grossed a somewhat disappointing $708,982,323.
Would loaning Spidey to Marvel reap more than that? Maybe, maybe not… it depends on how well the movie is received, etc. One thing though – any money that Sony would get for loaning Spider-Man to Marvel would be nearly all profit… they wouldn’t be making the movie, just loaning the rights to a character. It seems there would be very little reason not to consider a deal pretty heavily.
So thanks Sony, for getting our hopes up and then dashing them quite expertly.
[button type=”link” link=”http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2014/12/09/sony-marvel-discussed-spider-man-movie-crossover/” size=”btn-sm” variation=”btn-danger” target=”blank”]Source: The Wall Street Journal[/button]Last Updated on November 28, 2018.
