For owning the rights to one character out of 500?

From a creative point of view they did do a much better job of it so as a consumer it will be a shame if they cant resolve this.

I do know what you are saying about Disney though. They are definitely flexing their financial muscles.

If Sony stick to their guns you can bet your ass Disney will deliberately release a big Marvel film the same week as Sony's Spiderman and muscle them out of screens.

the fact that Disney would have been putting in the actual work to make the films

What?

Yeah, since Spider-Man has been in the MCU, Sony has had a Paramount style deal.

Do nothing, have your logo appear somewhere, make shit loads of money.

Sony won’t do a Spider-Man 3, they’ll do a reboot and fuck it up.

Yossarian wrote:

Sony were also being greedy, they’d been handed a huge franchise which they could have made a crapload of money off while doing absolutely nothing.

They weren’t handed anything, they paid for the rights to the character in the late 90’s (a move which kept Marvel afloat at the time as they were pretty much bankrupt) and then paid the production budgets for numerous films, at the very least keeping the character in the public conscience and along with X-Men at Fox providing Marvel & Disney with the blueprint for financially viable superhero movies.

If the Raimi Spider-Man or Singer X-Men had flopped, it’s unlikely we would have a Marvel cinematic universe at all.

The later deal was for Sony to essentially produce an MCU film, as Kevin Feige stated at the time.

“The agreement was that it is very much a Sony Pictures movie. Amy Pascal is co-producing it with us and [Sony Chairman] Tom Rothman is leading the charge for Sony”

In return Disney got to use the character Sony owns the cinematic rights to in it’s own films for free, received creative input into the Sony films got 5% of the gross and got to completely own the related merchandising to the film character (who still ranks as Marvel’s most popular character).

I didn’t see Disney offering Sony a cut of the merchandising money either.

I’d have told them to jog on as well.

Instead Sony made numerous counter offers, which Disney dismissed basically stating “I am altering the deal, pray I don’t alter it any further”

If I was at Sony, I’d now be more inclined to do a bit of universe building, push on with Into the Spiderverse 2 and look at doing a Spider-Gwen or Jessica Drew film before another Spidey sequel (Kraven).

Because let’s face it, Sony has the film rights to hundreds of characters in the Spider-Man universe and can do what they like with them.

LivDiv wrote:

The problem they face is Disney are fast becoming an absolute monster that will be impossible to battle.

They are getting to the size where profit projections are hard to compare and they will move into talk of market share "3 out of 5 ticket stubs are for Disney productions". At that point anyone doing anything similar to what Disney is doing will be totally fucked.

Ain’t that the truth.

And everyone knows when one company is completely dominant it can only mean good things for consumers as well as the industry at large.

I saw a hashtag. I laughed.

I haven’t seen Holland 2 but I’ll assume that writing Spider-man out of their universe now would make the Marvels look pretty ridiculous at this point as well. They’ve been bigging him up as the new hero to carry the marketing. Greed doesn’t really come into it. Or at least it does come into it but so much, on both sides, that it’s irrelevant. Greed ruined Maguire 3. Greed exhausted the franchise with the Garfields. Disney have built an empire on greed. Greed is everywhere.

Personally, the film industry hasn’t served Spidey that well. With the exception of Verse, none of them have been as faithful to the source as I’d want them to be. Maguire 1 and 2 have been the closest to what I want from a Spider-man film and they were still a way off.

To be fair with GotG he hadn’t just made a movie setting them up as the central focus for the next big Avengers event.

Then none of that happened.

After the events of Endgame, Peter lived a normal happy life, and nothing else fantastical happened in the world ever.

It’s worth not forgetting that the best Spider-Man film was made contemporaneously with the MCU but completely outside of it.

djchump wrote:

Ah right, I've not seen Spidey 2 yet.

Aye, careful with those spoilers.

djchump wrote:

Feige turned Guardians of the Galaxy into tentpole IP, so I'm sure he can manage fine without Spidey, especially if they're gearing up for X-Men and Fantastic Four or whatevers.

Starlord on a poster isn’t getting bums on seats like Spider-man. Iron Man wouldn’t have before his films either though so you’ve got a point. I predict this will end with Spider-Man still in the MCU, Disney getting a bigger slice and giving Sony some bumps or characters to use for their stuff or something. It’s in the interests of both for it to continue as is.

Conceivably the MCU wouldn’t even be able to mention the character that isn’t there anymore. Unless they’ve got that covered already in their first agreement.

Marvel posters are uniformly terrible so no surprises there