Spider-Man, Licensing and the SSU
Tom Holland is thwip’ing his Spider-Man across screens with his buddies in the MCU, yet Venom, Carnage, and Morbius are left to play around in their separate pocket dimension with Sony. This is not altogether dissimilar to Wolverine and the X-Men, regular allies of Spider-Man and Iron Man, and occasional members of The Avengers, being completely left out of the MCU lore.
Multiple Spider-Men from different franchises
This has led many a casual fan to wonder why, and the reality is licensing: it decides which production studio gets to play with any particular piece of intellectual property at any given time, and the licensing of Marvel properties has been a complicated issue for decades: somehow, Spider-Man managed to become the most complicated of all (most likely because he is arguably the single most valuable character in the Marvel universe).
Spiderman’s film rights were sold in 1999 to Sony, which was part of a larger garage sale by Marvel to avoid bankruptcy. The 90’s recession also saw several other significant sales, i.e., the film rights to The X-Men, Wolverine, and Deadpool were sold to Fox.
Sony used these film rights to produce a franchise that, while not as profitable, prolific, or expansive as the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU), were still quite successful. With the first Sony Spider-Man movie released in 2002, it pushed against a trend of comic book movies being few and far between. This was partially because most comic book movies had been both critically and commercially unsuccessful for decades, with the last real success arguably being Superman II in the early ‘80s (with an occasional Blade movie doing well, but not exactly exploding the Zeitgeist).
From there, tracking the various rights implicated in intellectual property becomes even more complicated: the merchandising rights were split between Marvel and Sony; Marvel retained a 5% stake in the movie profits; Marvel was purchased by Disney, which still retained 50% of the Spider-Man merchandising rights; Disney later purchased 100% of the merchandising rights to Spider-Man; Sony licensed Spider-Man to Disney for several MCU movies; Sony, meanwhile, retained movie rights for all of the Spider-Man properties, including an impressive ‘rogues gallery.’ This led to the Venom, Morbius, and Carnage movies, allowing Sony to get its own “Sony Spider-Man Universe” (SSU) off the ground to compete with Disney’s MCU.
As you can see, untangling the Spider-Man IP web is complicated and includes negotiations between some of the largest corporations on earth engaging in multi-billion dollar transactions that I am tragically not privy to. That being said, what should the fans expect from their friendly neighborhood intellectual property in the near future?
Sony is steadily establishing itself with the “Sony Spiderman Universe” (SSU) to compete with the MCU. This includes the upcoming Morbius film, a film that will star Kraven the Hunter, and a second Spider-Verse movie. Meanwhile, licensing has kept Tom Holland swinging around the MCU for at least another three MCU films.
With the SSU universe slowly expanding via standalone movies, it would be entirely possible to have a far more mature-oriented movie around one Spider-Man where Tom Holland gets killed off in the SSU, the mantle of canonical Spider-Man falls to someone new within the Venom and Morbius movie continuities to be mentored by Toby McGuire (cuz why not). All the while, the kids are entertained with a Saturday morning-style Spider-Ham cartoon that ties directly into Into the Spider-verse. Just a passing glance at the possible merchandising from this is enough to make He-Man and G.I. Joe jealous.
Currently, in my humble opinion, Sony is handling this property like a maestro: they are creating an expansive, self-referential SSU where I bet I’ll likely be seeing Jarred Leto’s Morbius opposite Tom Hardy in the near future. To smooth over the edges left by a competing property with Tom Holland being in the MCU, they’re expanding the Spider-Man multiverse concept explored in Into the Spiderverse to comfortably bring multiple mainstream Spider-Men into a reinvigorated Sony/Marvel ecosystem. This will give them options in the future on which Spider-Man will be fighting and/or teaming up with Leto or Hardy. Ultimately, they will likely control the future of Spider-Man and will decide whether he’ll be licensed out to Disney for the MCU, or if he’ll become the king of the competition in the SSU.
Where will this leave us? Who cares? Honestly, I just hope that the competition gives the consumer more of what they want (and I desperately want another R-Rated movie out of one of the above-mentioned franchises).