With Fox about to be gobbled up by Disney next week, Sony is the last remaining studio outside of the Mouse House that currently has film and TV rights to a Marvel character. And boy, do they have one of the big ones – Spider-Man. While it did appear in recent years that Sony was unable to capitalize on those rights, 2018 ushered in a new era with an Oscar-winning animated feature “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” and a box office behemoth in “Venom.” Now, it appears that Sony not only has a firm grasp on the universe of Spider-Man, but the studio also has a roadmap.
Speaking to Variety, Sony Pictures Television chairman Mike Hopkins and Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Tony Vinciquerra opened up a little about those plans. And since the movie side of things seems to be under control, with Marvel Studios doing solo Spidey adventures and Sony producing spin-offs, both live-action and animated, the executive says the next major focus in on the TV side of the equation.
“We have the next seven or eight years laid out as to what we’re going to do with [the Spider-Man rights], and that will not only be on the film side — it’ll be on the TV side,” says Vinciquerra. “Our television group will have its own set of characters from within that universe that we will seek to develop.”
He goes on to say that the TV team is “pretty far down the road in terms of working through which characters we think could be their own star of a series.”
We don’t know the full extent of what characters are included in the extended Spider-Man licensing agreement, but it’s said to be over 900 in total. That means that many of the series that Sony is currently working on definitely won’t be reliant on the Webhead. In fact, it appears that Sony is taking a page from the Disney/Marvel handbook, and creating some spin-offs on the TV side that turn into their own mini-universe.
“We’re developing a lot of Marvel-related content, and I think we’ll be out in the market very soon with something really, really big and transformational for us, because we’ve not done any shows with Marvel before, with Marvel IP,” says Hopkins. “So that’s a big piece of development that we’re onto.”
He adds, “I think we aspire to have several shows in a universe that we create that can pollinate between each other, and to working with a partner to make that happen.”
While the executive doesn’t specifically name any potential partners the studio has been talking to, the report says an announcement should be coming in the next couple of months.