As we noted earlier, the trailer Sony released today for this summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming really goes out of its way to emphasize it’s connections to Marvel Studios’ Cinematic Universe. That crossover between corporate entities came about due to a rather unique and unprecedented sharing deal between the two studios. But it appears as if that agreement has a built in end date.
Speaking with CosmicBookNews at CinemaCon today in Las Vegas, former Sony studio chief and Spider-Man: Homecoming producer Amy Pascal revealed that there the sharing agreement currently exists for a limited time only, and that time runs out with the release of Sony’s Spider-Man: Homecoming sequel, which has already been scheduled for a July 2019 release.
One of the things that I think is so amazing about this experience is that you don’t have studios deciding to work together to make a film very often. In fact it may never happen again, after we do the sequel. Because Sony, and Disney, and Marvel all decided that the right thing to do was to allow Peter Parker and Spider-Man to be in the MCU and to work with the Marvel guys and have them produce this film. And I think that was a very rare thing for three companies to do, and a very brilliant thing for them to decide to do because there are only so many stories that you can tell again and again and again about Spidey, and this is something that we would have never been able to do in any other way. So it was a very selfless thing that very smart on the part of all the companies.
Pascal and Marvel studio chief Kevin Feige had talked about the possibility of sharing the Spider-Man character between their two companies, but it took a lot of convincing to get their relatively higher ups to go along with the plan. Once they did, Sony scrapped their current plans for an expanded franchise of Spider-Man related films, in return allowing the wall-crawling hero to appear in last year’s Captain America: Civil War and next year’s The Avengers: Infinity War and possibly 2019’s Avengers 4. For their part, Marvel has allowed Robert Downey Jr’s Tony Stark/Iron Man to crossover to this summer’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.
So what happens if, after 2019, Marvel and Sony choose not to renew their deal? Does the Sony Spider-Man films continue on its own with Tom Holland and just ignore the lack of connection? Do they reboot the franchise yet again? As it has been so far, it will be interesting to see how this continues to play out.
