Sony Spider-Verse discussion thread

With all of the news coming out about Sony's plans for their Spider-Man franchise so close to the release of Spider-Man: Homecoming, a separate thread seemed like a good idea. Especially since that discussion will largely disappear once the anticipation thread gives way to the actual discussion thread.

Anyway, Sony has made announcements for movies starring Venom, Silver Sable and Black Cat (directed by Gina Price-Blythwood), and (Breaking News!) most recently, Kraven the Hunter and Mysterio. And according to Amy Pascal, these movies will exist within the same universe as their own Spider-Man Homecoming movie, and therefore by extension, the MCU (Although Kevin Feige didn't seem too pleased with the announcement).

This seems like a lot of Spider-Man related projects for movies that likely won't actually have Spider-Man in them.

And then there are the rumors. Venom will be hitching a ride with Spider-Man from Infinity Wars and the Silver and Black follow-up (getting ahead of ourselves are we Sony?) will be an all female super-hero jam.

Sony seems to be banking a lot on a franchise that will only have a tenuous connection to Spider-Man and the larger MCU. Will this dilute the larger MCU franchise or enhance it? What interest do you have in a Parker-less Spider-verse? What role, if any, should Marvel play in the creative process?

And awaaay we go...

 

And more breaking news that seems to have dropped almost literally as I was posting this thread-- the villain of the Venom movie will be Carnage.

 

It seems a bit strange to me to give characters like Kraven and Mysterio, who as far I know have only been Spidey villains their own movies. Are they going to be villains dealing with other heroes, anti-heroes, or will the include Spider-Man in some form?
It's honestly starting to get funny just how desperate the studios are all getting for their own cinematic universes.
When comes to Sony doing a cinematic universe, personally I'd rather see them go for Ghostbusters or Men in Black. Both of them are pretty open for expansions, all you need to do is starting introduced other teams, and I honestly think that would be a lot easier than trying to force every character from the Spider-Man comics into their own movies. Hell, they could even mix them into one universe and give us a crossover where teams from each organization join forces to fight alien ghosts. Honestly, I think that would make a lot more sense than the MIB/Jump Street crossover they've been talking about.

 

Interesting. I hadn't heard about the Kraven and Mysterio projects. Kraven could work as a solo project even without Spider-Man, leading up to an appearance in a future Spider-Man story. However, I don't see how Mysterio can work on his own and I say that as a big fan of the character.

As I mentioned somewhere, I like this idea and it works better than doing John Jameson again.

Sounds like Sony hasn't learned from their lessons yet.

 

this reminds me about all the plans Sony talked about around the time of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with all the spin offs planned. On the one hand, I'm not against any of these movies in theory. Honestly, movies based on villains could be interesting. A Mysterio or Kraven film isn't a terrible idea by itself. Still, it feels like Sony is going off with big plans way too soon. That said, the giant clusterf&*k of all these movies, if they get made, will probably be entertaining enough regardless of the quality of the actual movies.

 

They would seem to make a lot more sense as villains for the next Spider-Man movies. It would be nice to see some lesser-used and more atypical villains.

 

It's almost funny to watch Sony make the same mistakes all over again. I'd laugh, except they're looking to drop the ball on something I care about.

 

I wonder if Sony is trying to build up to an Avengers/Defenders/JLA style "Spider-Verse" team-up movie? Perhaps versus The Sinister Six?

If so, they could be building up to Marvel's third outing with the character, or perhaps a Sony exclusive fourth Peter Parker movie starring Tom Holland. Holland has already said that he wants to play the character for a long time, so I doubt that a contract extension would be an issue.

 

Who do they think is going to want to go and see these films based on z-list characters that 99% of the public have never heard of?

The idea that they could never get Black Cat into a Spider-Man movie but now she'll be sharing one with Silver bloody Sable is just laughable.

 

If there were any 'tension' or 'distance' between Sony and Marvel Studios in regards to Sony, on their end, linking their Spider-Man properties, including Spider-Man Homecoming, together, Kevin Feige would have said something on the subject by now. The fact that he hasn't speaks volumes about what's actually going on.

It's also rather sad how quickly people who were "over the moon" with excitement when this Sony/Marvel partnership was announced have had to come back down to Earth when faced with the reality that Sony now gets to play in the MCU sandbox, even tangentially, independently of Marvel Studios, and that Marvel Studios knew what they were signing up for and giving Sony access to when they made the deal.

 

Considering that was pretty much what they were trying to do in the Webb movies but with the Sinister Six, I think that's exactly what they're trying to do.

 

In fairness, weren't people saying the same thing about Guardians of the Galaxy a few years ago? And outside of Harley Quinn, most of the Suicide Squad lineup was people no one had heard of either.

Thing is, I knew that this was going to happen. There would be no point in Sony allowing Marvel to use Spider-Man unless they could use that tenuous Marvel connection to "legitimize" their other interrelated Spiderverse movies. Now, that doesn't change the fact that most of these characters don't make much sense outside of a Spider-Man context and doing a spin-off feels hasty when most of these characters haven't even appeared in a regular Spider-Man movie yet.

But, based on my understanding of what the deal was between Sony & Marvel, this was always something that Sony could do and not something that Marvel would be in any position to stop. At most, Marvel could passive-aggressively try to decanonize Sony's Spiderverse movies by throwing in a bunch of continuity stuff in their other movies that blatantly contradicts Sony's movies, but that's not necessarily much of an impediment. X-Men is still a successful & well-loved movie franchise despite several of their own movies not fitting particularly well together. Also, if Marvel wants to keep using Spider-Man in their own movies, they need to be careful not to piss off Sony too much because Sony can still take the character back whenever they want.

 

The thing is, by connecting each of these 'side projects' to Spider-Man Homecoming and its two direct sequels, even if it's only through references and "Easter Eggs" (which is what Sony is clearly going to do), said projects won't be existing 'outside of a Spider-Man context'. They'll be linked to Spider-Man even if he doesn't directly appear in them.

 

I don't mind something like Silver & Black, since Black Cat and Silver Sable aren't precisely villains and can easily have adventures that don't revolve around or even really need to include Spider-Man. It's movies about characters like Venom, or Kraven and Mysterio, that kinda make me stop and go: "Huh?" I know Venom is popular (though I don't know if he's really still as popular as he was 10+ years ago) and he's developed into more of an anti-hero because of that, but his origin is reliant on Peter Parker briefly playing host to the alien symbiote and then rejecting it.

Now, if Sony were planning for Venom to release in, say, 2019 or 2020 instead of October 2018, and be set after Avengers: Infinity War, perhaps during which Peter bonds with the symbiote (similar to how he did so in the comics' Secret Wars event), then I could see this working both as a solo movie and as a movie that's connected to the MCU, even if only tangentially. But I doubt that's where they're going to go with it...

 

I'll never understand why anyone thinks that matters. Had anyone ever heard of Luke Skywalker prior to 1977? Had anyone ever heard of Marty McFly prior to 1985?

They don't have to make references to the rest of the MCU, they just have to include Spider-Man. That's what I expect will happen: Marvel Studios films will include MCU elements, Sony films will include Spider-Man elements, and the Spider-Man films will be the only part of the Venn diagram where the two circles overlap.

What people are overlooking is that comic books have done this exact thing all the time -- different series have nominally been in the same universe but have effectively ignored each other and struck their own paths except on those rare occasions when they crossed over. Adam-Troy Castro wrote a good post about this on Facebook this morning. Large comic-book universes often have series that are nominally in-universe but are far more adult or more comedic than the normal stuff and thus tend to stay very far apart with minimal interconnection. Heck, that's how comics crossovers got started in the first place. In Golden and early Silver Age DC, each individual comic basically ignored the existence of all the other superheroes, even though there were team books where they worked together routinely.

And you see the same thing with the MCU television shows that the movies never acknowledge. Or with Doctor Who's spinoffs -- both Torchwood and Sarah Jane Adventures characters appeared on the flagship show, but never on each other, and any highly public near-apocalypse on one show would never be mentioned on either of the others.

Even series that are part of a shared universe are still their own entities first and foremost. Telling their own stories is the top priority; continuity with other series is a resource to be drawn on when it's useful, and only when it's useful.

 

Thanks for sharing.

 

Looking forward to Venom but definitely needs Spider-man in some capacity. Wonder how the hell they are going to do it. Other villains I have no interest in and it smells of the Sinister Six set up all over again.

 

After backtracking on the whole "Sony Spider-movies set in the MCU" thing, it is now rumored that a character set to debut in Homecoming, Mac Gargan, aka The Scorpion, will return to a larger role in Silver and Black. So are they set in the same universe or what? What we have here is a lack of communication.

Or perhaps it's a problem of definition and branding. "Marvel Cinematic Universe" has become the catch-phrase for all things set in that world, but the TV division's output, considered to be "MCU", isn't "cinematic" (meaning meant to be watched in a theater) and is largely out of Kevin Feige's purview. I think that in this instance he simply wants to differentiate between and establish that the Sony movies aren't a part of his (and his studios) vision and the MCU's overall story-arc. The MCU is his "brand" and "Sony's Marvel Universe" (It's new official name, by the way. SMU from now on?) is Amy Pascal/Sony's. This also puts the respective studio's names in their acronyms.

I guess if they introduce two different Mac Gargan's in two different movies released a year apart from each other, we'll know for sure.

 

Yeah, that's my thinking. It just means that we won't see the non-Homecoming Sony characters acknowledged in any of the MCU movies. It's kinda like how Joss Whedon said that, as far as he was concerned in making Age of Ultron, Coulson was still dead. That didn't mean Agents of SHIELD wasn't in the MCU, it just meant that AoU was made in a way that was independent of the show, that didn't address the show continuity because it wasn't relevant to the movie.

I expect the Sony movies will be in a similar position to the Marvel TV shows -- they'll follow the lead of the MCU movies and present themselves as part of that continuity, but the movies will not acknowledge them in return. The MCU movies will do their own thing as if nothing else existed, and everything else that purports to be in the same continuity will have to follow their lead and do its best to fit into that canon.

 

I know Sony has an animated Mile Morales movie in the works but why not use him in these live action movies!?!? Wait...http://io9.gizmodo.com/kevin-feige-confirms-that-miles-morales-exists-somewher-1796420962
Kevin Feige Confirms That Miles Morales Exists Somewhere in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.