It’s so sad that Spidey is such a cash cow for Sony. Still, nobody knew that Marvel could do what it did with the Avengers at the time.
Do the deals cover merchendizing, though? For example, I thought that Capcom had to get the rights for the Xmen and so on from Marvel, and not Fox, leading to the inclusion of Rocket Raccoon and Dr. Strange in the Marvel vs Capcom games, whereas Wolverine and such while included obviously were less updated and fleshed out (Wolvie was still in his yellow outfit, the Sentinels were still purple and red rockemsockems, while Rocket and Strange made it in at all).
Those rights are just movie rights. Video game rights are a completely separate beast. That’s why they could release “Lego Marvel Super Heroes”, which includes Spidey, X-men, FF, Iron Man and Cap, and about 150 other characters. And amusement park rights are separate as well. That’s why Universal Orlando has an entire Marvel Superhero section, including meet & greets with many of the characters, while Disney down the road which actually owns Marvel can’t even run a monorail with a picture of Iron Man through their own parks.
So uh…any chance the studios could do the smart thing and collaborate? I mean, look at the amount of money Sony’s made and Marvel’s made on their movies. Why wouldn’t the studios just agree to share character rights for a couple of movies? Sony can do their thing with Spiderman, with some minor direction from Marvel so Marvel can plug him into Avengers 4 or 5.
Thanks. And man that is shit. I really did like the civil war story line. I thought the implications and ideas were well done. It’s too bad they had to ret con so much. And it really made me hate tony stark.
I agree with Lasciel - Marvel will just grab on to some of the major ideas of Civil Wars and let the arc play out by MCU rules, not comic rules. It has marvelous potential for movies and conflicts for the next several decades.
The big problem is valuing it. If you’re Marvel, it’s not just what you could make for an Avengers 4 with Spiderman in it, it’s the marginal revenue over what you’d make for an Avengers 4 without Spiderman in it. You could easily argue that if Avengers 2 and 3 stay up at the top of the “top-grossing movies ever” list along with the first one, there’s really limited upside. If everyone’s going to see it anyways…
You’d be able to much more easily value getting Spiderman back in total, since now we’re (probably) talking about the difference between making a Spidey movie that ties in with the MCU and is not crap, or making a low-tier superhero movie out of whomever they’re down to in 2021. But of course Sony would want a lot more for that, likely over a billion depending on how it’s paid out.
Marvel’s hope would be that Sony will do Option 1 relatively cheap, hoping that they’ll get the benefit from a boost in interest in their Spidey movies. If I were Sony I’d want a decent amount, if only to ease the risk that seeing Spidey in the MCU would actually turn people off of my crappy Spiderman movies. We’ll see how it turns out.
(FTR, I’d be quite happy to never see Spiderman in anything ever again, but I find the business aspect of this absolutely fascinating. There’s also all the merchandising angles, which I am nowhere near familiar enough with. I kind of want to write a business-school level case study on the whole thing.)
The thing is, how on earth is that going to work with Winter Soldier? I’m one of the ones who really liked Civil War and would like to see a nuanced MCU treatment of it, but I want Cap 3 to be about the fallout from Winter Soldier! And that’s clearly what they were telegraphing with the end of that movie - finding Bucky, maybe the whole Sharon Carter thing. I’d hate for them to shoehorn that in with the Civil War thing. (Then again it could just be setup with Stark as the head of SHIELD, as in the comics, but then they’d have to fire Coulson.)
Winter Soldier should be settled first & it should be its own movie.
That said… Civil War? Wow. Yes, it needs to be made but…
Civil war was written in the Neo-Con post 9-11 era where “just do what we tell you, we’ll have the laws changed later”, said with a smirk, was the Dubya way. Many people objected and were targeted, but a lot were on board too (the joke was that so many people were genuflecting to Bush that he didn’t need A/C). Still, no matter who or what you believe, many of the schisms in America today directly relate to that [del]clown-show-leading-to-a-Depression[/del] time in American history.
As a country, are we ready to look at that yet and laugh? Remember, MAS*H couldn’t be done about the Vietnam war because it was too soon… so it was set to happen during the Korean Conflict.
