One of the pieces of information that shook loose from the recent Sony hack is that Marvel and Sony were in negotiations about Marvel including Spider-Man in their movies which appear to have ended poorly, or did they? According to the Latino Review who has insiders in the company, this deal isn’t as dead as the leak has announced it to be.
With Marvel wanting to include our favorite webhead in ‘Captain America: Civil War,’ early e-mails between the two studios stated that “Sony Pictures president Doug Belgrad tells Ms. Pascal about a potential scenario that would see Marvel produce a new trilogy of Spider-Man movies while Sony retains ‘creative control, marketing and distribution.”
Now it sounds like higher ups in the parent company are willing to give Marvel a bit more wiggle room on the creative control part but want a little more on the money side to allow this to happen. I’m sure their thinking is that making less off of the huge chunk of change Marvel will surely generate will work out better for them financially than taking a larger percentage of a vastly smaller profit.
Why the change? What it boils down to is that the bosses at Sony of Japan are so annoyed with how things are running, hack aside, that they want the movies to return to a more profitable set of films that focus on “quality” over the quantity of special effects. In fact, the article states that “Sony Japan thinks the Marvel deal for Spider-Man is still on the table and they want to renegotiate as a return to quality. The 60/40 split can be negotiated and Sony Entertainment’s October hard-line stance of wanting creative control is now mostly moot in the eyes of the higher-ups.”
It sounds as if they just want a little more of the percentage to sweeten the deal and we could actually see Peter Parker show up on screen next to the likes of Captain America and Iron Man! Now that is an exciting prospect, though I don’t think there is enough of a lead in time wise to have it happen for ‘Captain America: Civil War’ at this point. Currently Sony has a “Spidey-Summitt” being held in January for them to figure out the future direction of the franchise. In an ideal world we’ll see that lead over to Marvel picking up control of the films because the other option that seems to be on the table is a new direction of cinematic films for Spidey, in the form of animation. While on the one hand the studio wants that project to be run by Phil Lord and Chris Miller of ‘The Lego Movie’ fame, I’m pretty sure they are already a bit busy with producing ‘Ninjago,’ ‘The Lego Batman Movie,’ and ‘The Lego Movie 2’ at this time.
Honestly, right now my only real hope is that the “Spidey-Summitt” has the studio decide to go with Marvel instead of a bunch of stand alone or animated films.
What do you folks think? Should Sony tie its horse to Marvel who will end up making them both a ridiculous amount of money or should they keep going forward on their own and further alienating legions of fans as they have with the past three films? Share your thoughts below True Believers!
