By Conor Shea
Executive Editor
Spider-Man is going back to Marvel entertainment, in what is surely to one day be called the strangest deal in Hollywood history. Why, you might ask? Because rumor has it that both studios exchanged a whopping zero dollars for this overlapping film-rights deal.
Let’s rewind just 15 years ago to a time when Marvel Entertainment was no more than a thought in the mind of studio head Kevin Feigie. It was around this time that Marvel was wanted to see big screen versions of their comic book characters, but did not have the financial backing. Despite the size of the company, the profits from character merchandising was not yet enough to fund an independent movie studio.
The solution? Licensing of course. Marvel would sell the rights of their characters to big name movie studios, and reap the merchandising profits off the backs of those films. This is how we ended up with Sony “owning” Spider-Man, and Fox “owning” Daredevil, Punisher, The Fantastic Four, and X-Men. It would be just a few short years later that Marvel would start their own studio, and begin a long term plan to build a competing cinematic universe.
The films that Marvel Entertainment produced would earn the audiences’ approval, as well as the critics’. On the other hand, the studios that licensed characters would maintain a “hit or miss” average, eventually failing to build good will with the fans.
On internet forums cries of “Just give them back to Marvel” were typed time and time again with no real belief that this could ever happen. AMC Movie news host John Campea is a bit of an authority on this topic, and he has never believes this could happen.
His theory was that the unimaginable amount of money that Sony could value Spider-Man at would make the profit margins for Marvel Entertainment too thin.
Avengers already made over a billion dollars worldwide, and they did that with third tier marvel characters. How much more money could one character make, regardless of the fact that said character is Marvel’s most popular? Not enough to make that deal.
Then there was the argument about complications with profit from ticket sales. If Spider-Man was in the first Avengers film, the ratio of Marvel to Sony heroes would be 6 to 1. Would they then split the profits in such a way? Surely Spider-Man is a bigger audience attractor than Hawkeye, so this wouldn’t be fair to Sony.
While we may have debated the potential roadblocks around this deal for close to five years, it is now happening. The terms of the deal stipulate that no money shall change hands, but some change in the power distribution might occur. Avi Arad, Sony Executive and Spider-Man Executive Producer, is rumored to have been knocked back to a title only producer credit, with little to no influence on the final film.
A rebooted on-screen version of the web head is set to hit screens in a Marvel film (most likely “Civil War” in 2016), followed by spinoff films of his own.
Sony executive Amy Pascal will have some creative control over the rebooted wall crawler for Sony produced solo films, as will Kevin Fiege.
Andrew Garfield is almost guaranteed to be let go from his role portraying Peter Parker, and Marvel is likely to set their eyes on younger talent to replace him. Sources close to Marvel have pegged Logan Lerman and Dylan O’Brien as frontrunners.
Regardless of who plays Spidey next, he will be the figurehead for perhaps the strangest and most impressive deal to ever come out of Hollywood.
