So what's your take on the Disney-Sony Spider-man kerfluffle? As an actor/writer/show-businessman, do you think the whole thing is overblown or that Sony and Disney need to just sit down and thrash it out like adults? I think that a solution that would benefit both companies would leave the Spider-verse in the MCU, but what do I know?
Disney / Marvel know how to make Spider-Man movies that don’t suck, and Sony’s Spider-Man movies are so terrible, they could be Star Wars prequels.
I don’t see how this ends well for any fans, and it’s just another example of corporate greed run amok.
Holy bad take, Batman!
Okay, first, Sony has made a mixed bag of Spider-Man films (Spider-Man 1 and 2 are good, Spider-Man 3 is a trashfire, Amazing Spider-Man is bleh, Amazing Spider-Man 2 is…less of a trashfire than Spider-Man 3, and Into the Spider-Verse is a fucking masterpiece) while the MCU has had their own missteps (looking at you Age of Ultron and Civil War)
But let’s put that aside, because this whole framing that it is the fans who are suffering because these two companies can’t get along is so bad. The film industry right now is not in a healthy place for lots of reasons and Disney’s growing monopoly is a huge part of that. The merger with Fox was full of fanboys being like “yay now Wolverine can join the Avengers” but the reality of it is that there is now less studio resources to devote to new projects and huge layoffs at Fox’s film division. Disney is a very conservative company in the sense that they devote energy to proven products and take few real risks. A real effect it’s had is that the market is overflowing with blockbuster sequels to the properties they’ve acquired. Like, go look at any geek list of anticipated films coming in the next five years and count how many of them are either Disney or Disney owned companies. Sure, they aren’t totally to blame for the death of the mid-budget film but boy howdy are they making that problem so, so much worse.
This is also not a case of Sony being greedy and taking their ball and going home. Reports seem to indicate that it is Disney either making unreasonable demands and/or backing out of the deal first because they couldn’t get Sony to make more concessions. And it is definitely Disney that’s hiring sock-puppet proxies online to spread a huge amount of those “you can’t take Peter away, he and Tony have suffered to much” posts. Not all of those kinds of posts are like that, not by a long shot (for instance, this one) but Disney is more than willing to leverage that fan outrage to try to screw over a rival company. And I’ve seen a lot of fans on twitter hoping that Disney just buys Sony, which would be horrible.
So back to the first part: it doesn’t matter who makes better films about a teenager who swings around New York because in the real world the villain is Disney chocking out their competition and flooding the market with blockbuster sequels to all the properties they’ve acquired.