To say Sony don't have a clue about what to do with Spider-Man is like saying Peter Parker's a bit of a nerd; it's at once blatantly obvious and just scratching the surface of a wider point. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 highlights everything wrong with modern Hollywood - corporately produced to death and disregarding anything that made the property initially appealing, it was so financially precarious that a worldwide box office upwards of $700 million saw it regarded as a failure. The massive Spider-verse plans Sony had marked up (The Sinister Six, a Venom movie and a female led spin-off, all before The Amazing Spider-Man 3 in 2018) are all on shaky ground (read: won't happen) following the messy sequel and the email hacks revealed the studio is throwing anything at the wall in the hope they spontaneously transform into glue (an animated The Lego Movie style comedy, an Aunt May prequel). To keep things short and as a minimally depressing as possible, the main up-shot is that Sony is flirting with renting out their screen-rights to the character to Marvel for an appearance in The Avengers, with the studios dividing up the profits. But while Spider-Man could still appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe in some form (although that's far from certain), don't for one second think that means that'd be the end of Sony's fun with the web-crawler. Spidey is their biggest property (they also own distribution rights to Bond, but that's not got any shared universe potential) and for them to just sell it back to the original owners would be financial suicide. Any Marvel deal will be on a short-term basis, ensuring Sony still have executive control over the character. And, as Sony need to make a new film every five years or so to retain those rights, you can bet they'll rush out another movie. Just please don't make it an origin story. Which of these movies do you want to see? And which should never make it past the concept stage. Share your thoughts down in the comments.
