Though fans were sniffy about the idea at first, Sony’s initial attempts to create their own Marvel franchise using characters from the Spider-Man mythology has worked wonders so far, with Venom making big bucks at the box office and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse winning an Oscar. The studio will continue to produce new Spider-movies, of course, but it turns out they’re also interested in expanding their sights onto the small screen as well.
As part of a piece by Variety, Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Tony Vinciquerra revealed that the next eight years’ worth of Marvel content has already been laid out, including the TV side of things.
“We have the next seven or eight years laid out as to what we’re going to do with that asset, and that will not only be on the film side — it’ll be on the TV side. Our television group will have its own set of characters from within that universe that we will seek to develop.”
Former Hulu executive Mike Hopkins has been put in charge of getting Sony’s Marvel television efforts off the ground and explained to Variety that the studio’s on the cusp of revealing its “transformational” plans for the Spider-Man-related franchise to the world.
“We’re developing a lot of Marvel-related content, and I think we’ll be out in the market very soon with something really, really big and transformational for us, because we’ve not done any shows with Marvel before, with Marvel IP. So that’s a big piece of development that we’re onto.”
Hopkins then went on to suggest that Sony has plans for what sounds like a shared universe of TV shows (think the Arrowverse or the Marvel/Netflix’verse) which can “pollinate between each other.”
“I think we aspire to have several shows in a universe that we create that can pollinate between each other, and to working with a partner to make that happen.”
It’s too early to say what kind of characters we can expect to see get their own shows, but we already know that the cast of Spider-Verse are getting an animated series. Luckily for Sony, Spider-Man‘s corner of the Marvel universe is a deep one, so they should have lots to mine from when crafting the TV side of the franchise.