Spider-Man

With Sony’s ‘Spider-Man’ properties recently bouncing back from the abysmal state the company left them in after ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2,’ (mostly thanks to their alliance with Marvel and the MCU, in my opinion), the company and the franchise has had a stellar couple of years recently with ‘Spider-Man: Homecoming’ launching Spidey’s solo movie outings in the MCU, ‘Venom‘ proving to be a big success despite middling critical and fan reviews and encouraging Sony to continue on with their Spidey-less Spider-verse, and ‘Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse’ launching a third Spider-Man universe, this time animated, with a world of possibilities since the whole thing revolves around Spider-folk from a number of different dimensions/ universes uniting to end a threat in the universe of the latest new Spider-Man, Miles Morales. With all of these successful universes now ready for sequels and spin-offs, it is no wonder that rumors have sprung up that Sony has begun entertaining the idea of spinning off parts of the franchise to the small screen, especially with something like ‘Into the Spider-verse’ which has a number of built-in characters like Spider-Ham, Spider-Man Noir, and Peni Parker who could lead their own shows, and give audiences backstories to these side-characters from ‘Into The Spider-verse.”

While speaking to Variety recently, Sony Pictures Television chairman Mike Hopkins seemed to confirm this sentiment, stating:

“We’re developing a lot of Marvel-related content, and I think we’ll be out in the market very soon with something really, really big and transformational for us, because we’ve not done any shows with Marvel before, with Marvel IP. So that’s a big piece of development that we’re onto…I think we aspire to have several shows in a universe that we create that can pollinate between each other, and to working with a partner to make that happen.”

Of course, this is just assuming that they are going with characters from ‘Into the Spider-Verse,’ or the animated medium at all. Or even that they are not going to create a FOURTH Spider-Man universe on the small screen (similar to the CW’s Arrowverse for DC) that they can do whatever they want with and not worry about continuity with the movies. For all we know, they could even be looking at live-action television shows that exist in the same Spider-Man live-action universe as ‘Venom’ and the upcoming ‘Morbius,’ which would be bold for Sony, but since that universe is already hurting for recognizable characters, which makes the idea very unlikely to me (why would they waste characters on TV when they need any and all characters with any name recognition at all for those movies?).

And the other big question is, where would Sony’s television content even go? Hulu is pretty much in Disney’s pocket, Netflix and Marvel have soured on one another, so one would hope Sony would not want to piss off Disney/Marvel by making a deal with Netflix, and Network television brings a whole slew of limitations that I doubt Sony would really want to deal with.

Do you have any ideas on how Sony can make this work? Any theories on what characters would work best for television from the Spider-Man library? Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below!