With all the talk right now around Disney acquiring Fox and the plethora of Marvel IPs that will be coming back under the guidance of Marvel Studios, there remains one major IP that has not quite come home yet: Spider-Man. Yes, I know that Spider-Man is currently appearing in the MCU right now and we have Spider-Man: Far From Home due to hit this summer, but it remains a Spider-Man in which Sony can still dictate to Marvel which characters they can and cannot use.
For me, it still feels like Marvel doesn’t have the freedom to use Spider-Man and his rogue’s gallery in the way they would choose if they owned the IP. For evidence of that, we only have to look at both Venom and the upcoming Morbius, both of which exist in Sony’s own Spider/VenomVerse they are developing. The part I still cannot get my head around is that this Spider-Verse of Sony’s or VenomVerse depending on what you call it, doesn’t actually have Spider-Man in it. This remains a major issue for me and as yet I still have no plans to watch Venom…ever, and I have zero interest as a Marvel fan in Morbius. My reasons are simple, no Spider-Man, no interest from Cam, that’s it and I don’t expect anyone else to feel the same way.
Now we have learned that Sony intends to double down on their plans for this breakaway movie universe and like Marvel before them, are also getting into producing content for TV as well as movie theaters. Sony Pictures Television chairman Mike Hopkins recently spoke with Variety and whilst the interview covers many aspects of how Hopkins is trying to change the fate of Sony’s TV division, he also revealed plans for the Marvel character IP’s as well. Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Tony Vinciquerra had already told Variety,
“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. Our television group will have its own set of characters from within that universe that we will seek to develop.”
To which Hopkins added saying they are,
“Pretty far down the road in terms of working through which characters we think could be their own star of a series. 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.”
Of course, Sony does not have their own major TV networks or a streaming service so where would these IP’s end up being shown? Hopkins indicated that while Disney+ is a possibility, there are others to be considered and that this would all be announced further down the line. It’s theoretically possible then that these Sony/Marvel TV shows could end up on Netflix, Amazon, or even Hulu? At this point, we would just be guessing where Sony’s TV content could appear.
I don’t work for Sony and have zero interest in how well their company does financially, so I’ll come at this from a Marvel fan point of view. For me, the more content Sony develops for their own universe, the less likely any of that content appearing in the MCU becomes. It also makes me think that eventually once Sony has established their connected universe that they are going to want to take back Spider-Man himself at some point and go on their own. The fan in me feels that we have barely scratched the surface of Spider-Man within the MCU, and realistically I’d love to see Spider-Man and actor Tom Holland grow into an older and more mature leader within the MCU in the years to come.
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All I can say is that if Sony announced they were developing a Kraven TV series for Amazon (Just picking two random examples), I wouldn’t be rushing out to subscribe to Amazon. Saying that, I am already an Amazon subscriber so I would have to test the waters and see what it was like if such a move ever happened. Sony will never sell the Spider-Man IP back to Marvel anytime soon, it’s their crown jewel and a guaranteed way to make money. My issue with Sony is that they don’t seem to worry too much about the quality as long as their movies fall below budget and make some profit, this approach by Sony as a studio has in the past left us with some poorly managed IP’s and I for one have lost any faith in Sony to deliver entertainment products which meet my needs, I guess they can only change this by producing better content though?
It’s all very intriguing and vague for now, but we will share any further news about Sony’s Marvel plans as we get it.
What do you think of Hopkins comments and would you be interested in seeing Sony’s Marvel IP being used for TV shows? Sound off in the usual place below
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SOURCE: Variety
