While Spider-Man has for the most part been a big draw at the box office for years the character is going through a bit of a cinematic renaissance. Marvel Studios and Sony have been collaborating on the new Spider-Man movies in the MCU to tremendous success, and Sony is still riding the high of SPIDER-MAN: INTO THE SPIDER-VERSE winning the Best Animated Feature Oscar. Couple those triumphs with the successful release of another Marvel-related project, VENOM, and it should come as no surprise that Sony has the next seven years’ worth of content with the character and his pals mapped out.
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Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Tony Vinciquerra and Sony Pictures Television chairman Mike Hopkins were speaking with Variety recently about their plans for the future, and right now they’re looking to keep carving out a big slice of the Marvel pie.
“We have the next seven or eight years laid out as to what we’re going to do with that asset, and that will not only be on the film side — it’ll be on the TV side,” says Vinciquerra. “Our television group will have its own set of characters from within that universe that we will seek to develop.”
Variety notes that Sony has the movie and TV rights to over 900 Spider-Man related characters, so that’s more than enough content to make shows and movies out of. While that seems daunting, Hopkins added that they’re “pretty far down the road in terms of working through which characters we think could be their own star of a series.”
Sony once had a big cinematic universe planned, meant to kick off with THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 in 2014. That movie failed to live up to expectations, and soon the studio was collaborating with Marvel and Disney to incorporate the character into their MCU – while Sony continued to hold the rights. The end result has made for the Wall-Crawler’s biggest outings yet in movies like CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR, SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING and AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR, with more on the way. Now Sony has more success under their own house, such as last year’s hugely successful VENOM and the Oscar-winning SPIDER-VERSE, which means they’re now at peak confidence to keep expanding.
“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,” says Hopkins. “So that’s a big piece of development that we’re onto.”
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While planning for big cinematic universes down the line doesn't always bode well for studios (DCEU, Dark Universe), Sony doesn't seem as interested in a shared, connected universe of films like the MCU, but rather just making more movies with Spider-Man characters. I'm always down for more, and as long as they keep carving out their place in the cluttered superhero space with unique projects (for better or worse), they should finally have their own little section carved out alongside the MCU and DC movies.
SPIDER-MAN: FAR FROM HOME is in theaters July 5.