The Amazing Spider-Man movies were divisive among fans for a variety of reasons, but pretty much everyone had hoped that Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker would make his way into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. That obviously didn’t happen and instead, the decision was made to reboot the franchise with a new actor – Tom Holland – being introduced in Captain America: Civil War last year before going on to headline his own outing in this July’s Spider-Man: Homecoming.
By this point, we’ve heard a variety of stories about why Sony Pictures decided to team up with Marvel Studios and what that could mean for the character’s future, but now, Homecoming executive producer Amy Pascal has shed some light on why this unique partnership ended up playing out the way it did.
“We made five Spider-Man movies. And we needed to do something different. And we tried doing a lot of different things as you all know and documented. But the thing that we hadn’t done was put him in the Marvel universe, and put him in a world where there are other superheroes. Because he was always the only superhero. And there’s only so many times that you can tell the story of, “I really want everyone to love me and if I tell them I’m Spider-Man, they’ll love me…but I can’t tell them!” So, we’ve told that story as many ways as I could figure out. And Kevin [Feige] and I had been working together since the very first movie, because he used to get coffee for Avi [Arad], if you can believe it. He was very good at getting coffee, though.
He’s an even better producer, but he’s also good at coffee. So it felt like we needed to do something else and this felt like the right thing to do. And Kevin and I had been talking for a very long time about that. And here’s the thing that I wanted, I emphasize for all of you, because I think this is really important and I don’t think it will ever happen again in the history of the movie business: you have three studios that came together to have this movie being made. And no studio likes to share anything with anyone, let alone three studios.
And truthfully – there is nothing cynical I can find in this statement – everybody did it because they wanted Spider-Man to be great. Truly, it was because Spider-Man is great, the character is great and people love him. That’s good for Disney. That’s good for Marvel. And that is certainly good for Sony. So, the fact that all these companies were willing to work together to make that happen, to make – you know – believing that everybody needed each other in order to have that happen. I think that’s pretty miraculous.”
When you consider the fact that Sony was planning at least two more instalments of The Amazing Spider-Man franchise with spinoffs revolving around both Venom and Sinister Six in the works when the second movie was released, it’s surprising they gave up so soon. Then again, box office numbers fell quite short of expectations and it was obvious that audiences weren’t pleased with the direction they were headed in with the rebooted series.
It’s good to hear then that Sony realizes they need Kevin Feige, as it’ll hopefully mean a long-running relationship between the two studios as they look to keep the wall-crawler firmly in the same world as the Avengers. It’s still unclear exactly how long he’ll remain in the MCU, but we do at least know he’ll appear in Avengers: Infinity War after Spider-Man: Homecoming, so we can definitely look forward to seeing him show up once more alongside Earth’s Mightiest Heroes next year before Sony potentially takes him back.
