Disney and Sony call it quits, Spider-Man probably no longer in MCU

This is some "uh, what" kind of news, but it looks like Disney wanted to have a more equitable share in the financing of future Spider-Man movies and Sony wanted to keep the contract they already had where Disney received 5% of all the money the movies were making. I kind of get where Sony's coming from, as their Spider-man movies have been massive successes in the past, but undoubtedly made a shit-ton more money with Iron Man in the mix and the ability to promote the character in the Avengers movies and etc. With Endgame having just come out, though, theoretically now is the best time to make this kind of break, even if it is kind of a bummer that we won't see Spider-man palling around with Squirrel Girl anytime soon.

I also have no idea what this means for a prospective Into the Spider-verse sequel, as that was another "in association with Marvel" things. Would be a real bummer if they don't make any more of those.

Sony Pictures could fuck up a train wreck.

Venomverse here we come! lol sinster six is gonna have jared leto

50/50 seems like a big change but countering that offer with "hey but how about 5%?" seems equally idiotic. They could have agreed on like a 20/80 or even 30/70 split but now the whole thing is kind of fucked so good job greedy executives.

Pretty aggravating. The Netflix debacle, now this. Then there's the fact that without X-men or Fantastic 4 in the immediate future Phase 4 looks lackluster as hell. Who's the big bad now? I heard rumors that they were gonna have Norman Osborn in that role, but that's obviously not going to happen. Spider-man no longer in the MCU is lame, but it's even lamer that we never got around to seeing the actual down on his luck, scraping to survive, about to have a mental breakdown, Peter Parker a lot of us older fans identified with growing up. Not that they'd ever get there as they glossed over "Demon in a Bottle" with Stark, but dammit, I'd rather have whatever Feige was gonna give us than what we'll probably get from Sony and that's fucking symbiotes left and right. Venom ruined Spider-man, the comics, the original trilogy, and now again...

Everybody is blaming sony but Disney got too greedy. They also mess up their own continuity now since they were billing spiderman to take Iron Man's place. Sure the movie grossed more than any other sony movie but giving up 50 percent would cause sony to lose more profits than they earned on any of the other spiderman movies. They probably took that as an insult.

Also, doesn't this end the video game deal too? It's a loss for everybody, but maybe they can still get a deal done later on.

Just when you think they finally got this whole Spider-Man licensing thing figured out, executives find a way to fuck it up for everyone again.

Yeah, agree. Also, it was exceedingly weird to see the internet go from "DISNEY IS TAKING OVER THE WORLD WHAT THE HELL MAN THEY MUST BE STOPPED!" to "WHAT IS SONY THINKING WHY WON'T THEY JUST GIVE DISNEY WHAT THEY WANT!?"

That 50/50 offer (or demand) must have come packed with something else. No reasonable negotiatior would approach another, saying, "I want to keep everything as is, but I need half now."

Of course this is distressing to some. Marvel is sailing into uncharted territory, and one of their best-working emergency flares just vanished.

So I wouldn't see my little pretty Tom Holland as Spider Man anymore?! WTF

The other thing was very likely Disney telling Sony how badly the internet will react and how the majority of the blame will be lumped on Sony. And it already has.

Given the timing, I wonder if this turn of events played a role in Sony's acquisition of Insomniac? With Disney owning the video game rights could they have swung in scooping them up preventing the sequel....which they have to be already at work on....from being a Playstation exclusive or even appearing on Sony's platform?

This is the thing. Don't forget Disney got 100% of merchandising rights... 50/50 is absurdly bad deal especially when Disney literally put $0 in. Anybody putting the blame on strictly Sony is purely blinded by Disney fandom. People acting like Sony cant make a good Spider Man movie as if Into the Spiderverse doesn't exist. Nevermind Sony made 5 live action movies BEFORE the Tom Holland saga (good or bad is irrelevant to the point) and Venom made an insane amount of money for a movie that really wasn't great. Spiderman was just fine before the MCU.

As I a comics fan and an MCU fan, I hate this. I love Spider Man and Tom Holland's Peter Parker, I love that Spider Man is part of and a huge focus in the MCU. At least the comics and MCU will be more alike than ever now with messy, convoluted stories and a bunch of retcons coming...amirite

It may bite Sony in the ass, but good for them for standing up to Disney

Maybe Marvel shouldn't have sold the rights to Spider-Man over to Sony in the 90's and we would never be in this situation

Yeah this is a weird one. I know that SIE and Sony Pictures are two, completely separate divisions, so maybe there is a different deal in place. If Insomniac is STILL doing SM2, there is 0% chance its not a PS5 exclusive, but the fall out from this deal could result in Disney giving the game to someone else and making it multiplatform. We've had plenty of bad SM games before Insomniac.

Update to this ( I researched a little): While Marvel owns both Marvel Studios and Marvel Games, they are different umbrellas just like Sony with SIE and Sony Pictures. The deal with Playstation (SIE) was done with Marvel Games and it will not be affected by the movie stuff.

Wasn't this always going to be the case? I remember reading that after the 2nd Spider-man movie that he would no longer be a part of the MCU. If Disney really wanted 50% then I honestly can't blame Sony from not taking that awful deal. In general Sony or Marvel itself in comics or cartoons even just do not know what to do with the Spider-man character and property in the last 10 years.

Hope this gets fixed. Both sides benefit greatly from the deal. Disney's demands are high but Sony's walk-out is equally ludicrous. Negotiate you greedy fucks.

sad, but good on Sony for not getting bullied into this.

It's important to keep in mind Disney was also asking Sony to step up and split the bill on production and marketing as well. For these past four years, Sony has been collecting money hand over fist on everything Spider-Man, from appearance fees for the Marvel movies to most of the profits on their own films, while Marvel has also been footing the bill for most of the production and arranging most of the marketing. Remember how most of the press interviews kept talking about both of Sony's films as a bigger part of the MCU and how exciting it was to be joining such an expansive cast of talented actors and actresses and such a large cultural moment and all of that? If those were Sony-arranged marketing engagements, you can bet there would have been a lot less talk about that, and Holland would have appeared on a let less fewer couches with Downey, Cumberbatch and Hemsworth.

To my mind, either way this thing winds up playing out everybody wins on the content side - Sony gets to keep all their money and their Spider-Man, Disney gets to wipe its hands clean of an always uneasy partner and enter Phase 4 and 5 with a clear vision of what's possible for them - but there's only one way that the fans win, and that's if Sony recognizes how integral Disney and their MCU was to the success of their Spider-Man reboot, but also how integral Marvel's production teams, writers rooms and marketing goons were to the endgoal of getting theater audiences to trust and like the Spider-Man franchise again.

To my mind, Disney is asking for the equivalent of a major athlete asking their team for a big payout after years of taking under-market deals just to make sure the team could sign other stars and contend for championships. Disney/Marvel essentially played the role of Steph Curry here, and now they wanted to get paid but Sony thinks they can build a contender on their own. We'll just have to see I guess, but I don't have much faith. Lucky for them all the actors are under Sony contracts, if they'd actually been working for Marvel this would have truly been an ungodly mess.

Failure to resolve this is going to result in some drastic course correction for the MCU.

Rumors were flying that the Dark Avengers might show up in Phase 5, but you can't really do that without Norman Osbourne. Although I suppose they could try to pull an Arrowverse and just swap Spidey for a different but similar NY based hero. If they pulled Daredevil over to the big screen they could bring with him The Kingpin and potentially Norman, without having to dip back into the Spiderverse. Sure, Daredevil doesn't deal with Norman often, but Oscorp is in NYC, and so is the Devil of Hell's Kitchen. Plus I just really like the actor who played Matt Murdock and would love to see him take advantage of that big screen clause in his contract.

All the character development done with Spiderman is going to be lost as well. Far From Home basically set him up as the new central hero of the MCU, giving him the resources of Tony Stark. Happy basically christened him the new Tony halfway through the film.

This might also cause issues for the upcoming Blade and Morbius projects as both characters have crossed paths with Spiderman in the past.

Short of killing Spiderman off, which would be a horrible bummer, I'm not sure how they can fix this. They're going to end up Captain Marveling him. "Hey, where's the kid?" "Off world, being busy, don't invoke his name!"

I guess the good news is they have until the end of Phase 4 to figure this out. Nothing listed in the next few years will suffer too terribly without Spiderman. Sure, it would be fun to cameo him in few films, but no one is going to be watching Doctor Strange and wondering what Peter Parker is up to.

Here's hoping they come to their senses sometime in the next four years and renegotiate!

@atastyslurpee: Not exactly what I was getting at, I meant...even though we know Disney has said they're out of game development, I wonder in light of Sony threatening to pull Spidey out of the MCU (which had been rumored for weeks) if they were considering on making a play for Insomniac and Sony beat them to it. With the negative reaction of Crystal Dynamics' Avengers and the troubles at EA with the Star Wars license, could Disney have been scouting the one solid thing they had going video game-wise?

@shiftygism: I doubt either Disney or Insomniac would have wanted that. Disney got out of the video game business for a reason, probably because they couldn't make enough money out of it with Disney IP's. And one good studio with one good Marvel game wouldn't have changed that. They are probably better off letting other studios use there IP's and take there cut. And its a little fast for an organization as big as Disney to have such a knee jerk reaction of buying an entire studio just as a screw you.

Odds are Sony was making sure Microsoft with its recent spending spree didn't snag up another big studio most people associate with Sony already. Or maybe Insomniac was a little hard for money after Fuse and Sunset Overdrive didn't perform as well as they hoped, and Sony was probably the logical ask to buy them if they had a say in it.

I could really give a flapping fart about either company, but I'll admit some pleasure seeing Disney get a (likely temporary) middle finger from somebody, even if it's another company about as tolerable as the filmy shit stain at the bottom of a toilet.

It's interesting how people blame Sony.

If Disney wants to have a B2B deal, make a real offer not a suckers deal. Planty of moneye for everyoen, so Dinsey does not ALL the money just for itself. But, hey, what do you expect? Disney was always good at making Lemmings (seemingly like some MCU fans) jump off a cliff to blame Sony.

I am kinda disappointed we won't see Spiderman in future MCU movies. It would have been interesting to see Spiderman in a Fantastic Four movie fighting Doctor Doom. I really liked how Disney build up Spiderman to cross paths with so many superhero's in the MCU and have funny interactions with them. Then now everything is just gone. Hopefully we see Sony and Disney work again in the future depending on what happens after Phase 4.