Once upon a time, The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and 4 had release dates locked in, while Drew Goddard was attached to write and direct a Sinister Six spinoff as Sony’s plans for an entire universe built out from their most marketable asset gathered pace at what was admittedly an alarming speed.
As it turns out, the entire thing imploded before it even had a chance to get started, with Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios swooping in to strike an unprecedented deal that would see the world’s biggest franchise share Spider-Man with a rival studio, while both parties took home a share of the profits.
As revealed in new book The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe via TheDirect, Sony’s Amy Pascal wanted to run her plans for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 past Feige after he’d given notes on the previous two films, but the architect of the MCU had much bigger plans in mind for the web-slinger that he couldn’t risk being made public.
“With no time to spare, Feige announced an ‘all hands on deck’ situation: Every executive producer at Marvel Studios had to be part of a secret, two-day long, off-site retreat, held in a rented hotel space in Santa Monica. No one else at Marvel Studios was told about what they were doing, just that it was a ‘get-together.’ In that closed room, two questions were posed: If there were an opportunity to broker some kind of deal with Sony, how would it work? And if they leveraged something like a five-picture deal, what stories would they want to tell?”
Feige has always been several steps ahead of the competition as the success of the MCU has shown, so it’s no surprise that he saw an opportunity and took it by mobilizing the troops to come up with a plan for Spider-Man‘s rebooted introduction into his mythology, even though Sony weren’t expecting him to come out with anything even resembling a potential deal heading into his meeting with Pascal.
Published: Oct 24, 2021 12:53 pm