Marvel and Sony Working On Plan To Share Spider-Man?

As if Marvel Studios wasn’t already an unstoppable force in Hollywood, a new rumour suggests they may be planning to team with Sony to introduce Spider-Man to their sprawling cinematic universe.

Hitflix’s Drew McWeeny has written an extensive blog about the state of superhero cinema, and within it claims to have heard that Sony Pictures are working on plans to re-energise their ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ franchise and connect the character to Marvel’s film universe.

“While I can’t get the confirmations I need to verify the story,” he writes. “I’m hearing that there are some very cool Spider-Man plans being discussed that would help Sony refocus their enormously important franchise while also opening up some connections in the onscreen Marvel movie universe that would blow fandom’s minds.”

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As it stands the rights to big screen versions of Marvel properties are split between three big studios. Sony have Spider-Man and his affiliated characters, 20th Century Fox has the X-Men, Fantastic Four and affiliated characters. Marvel has pretty much everyone else, headlined by Iron Man, Captain America and The Avengers.

“Will it work out? I don’t know,” continues McWeeny. “I would love to be able to state for sure that it’s happening. What seems clear from what I’ve heard is that Marvel wants to be able to play with all of their characters, and if they can make that work creatively and on a corporate level, they will, and that means the world gets bigger again.”

Marvel are already planning to greatly expand their pool of big screen characters following next year’s ‘Avengers: Age of Ultron’, with Ant-Man, Doctor Strange and supposedly Ms Marvel and Black Panther all getting things started with their own series.

Sony and Marvel very nearly worked together before. The two studios had struck a deal to include the Oscorp Tower of ‘Amazing Spider-Man’ in the New York skyline of ‘Avengers Assemble’, but the deal was struck too late in production to make it a reality.

As McWeeny says Marvel want all their characters back under their control, having signed off the rights during a period of financial uncertainty back in the 90s. Now that they wield as much power as they do in Hollywood they have enough weight to make deals happen, but working with other studios comes with risks they will be eager to avoid.

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Picture credits: Sony Pictures / Marvel Studios