Marvel in Talks with Sony Regarding Spider-Man

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Avengers w/ Spidey
One need only be moderately nerdy to know that Spider-Man is a Marvel Comics character.

But we acknowledge that you have to be at the next level of nerd to know that Spider-Man, as he’s existed on the big screen to date (in either his Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield incarnations), is not the property of Marvel‘s Disney-owned motion picture division. The studio behind the outrageously successful Avengers, Iron Man, and The Guardians of the Galaxy does not own the film rights to a few of its comic book parent’s most famous characters.

As such, although the recent Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Avengers, and even Guardians of the Galaxy films have all taken place in the same cinematic universe, that universe has not included the X-Men, Fantastic Four, or Spider-Man.

In the days before Marvel decided to make their own movies, they sold off the rights to those characters to other major studios, and as a result Sony Pictures Entertainment owns Spider-Man. Director Sam Raimi had great success with the character in three films made during the ’00s, and two moderately successful films with the character have been made this decade by the studio.

Now, however, it seems Marvel is in preliminary talks with Sony to strike a deal where they could bring the character — Marvel Comics‘ flagship character and longstanding company mascot — into their already existing cinematic universe (which is to be expanded next summer with Avengers: Age of Ultron and the Paul Rudd starring Ant-Man).

HitFlix, a movie geek site with a pretty good track record for accurate gossip, had this to say on the matter:

“While I can’t get the confirmations I need to verify the story, I’m hearing that there are some very cool “Spider-Man” plans being discussed that would help Sony refocus their enormously important franchise while also opening up some connections in the onscreen Marvel movie universe that would blow fandom’s minds. Will it work out? I don’t know. I would love to be able to state for sure that it’s happening. What seems clear from what I’ve heard is that Marvel wants to be able to play with all of their characters, and if they can make that work creatively and on a corporate level, they will, and that means the world gets bigger again.”

It seems that, at this time, Fox is less interested in sharing the X-Men characters with Marvel (Fox also has a Fantastic Four movie coming out next year).

Below, IGN reports on a separate but related story.