For a studio chief sitting on one of Hollywood’s most valuable IP relationships, Tom Rothman sounds unusually clear-eyed about the limits of endless expansion. In a new interview with The Town, the Sony boss describes the studio’s partnership with Marvel on “Spider-Man” as a “great” win-win, talks openly about rebooting the Sonyverse, and points to a lesson even Kevin Feige seems to be embracing in the post-overload era: scarcity has value.
Begrudingly, the studio decided to bring in Marvel Studios to help not only reintroduce their new “Spider-Man” in “Captain America: Civil War” but also enlist to produce three extremely profitable solo films set directly within the mainline Marvel Cinematic Universe (something studios have been trying to recreate over the years with less than stellar results). Rothman would go on calling that pact with Kevin Feige/Marvel “a smart and mature decision” by the former heads of Sony Pictures (Amy Pascal and Michael Lynton, the former still a major producing force on the franchise) ahead of his arrival at the studio (after exiting 20th Century Fox).
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Rothman describes the current relationship between Sony and Marvel Studios as “great…a true win-win deal,” adding that “Kevin Feige is a genius.” Which isn’t all that surprising, as they’re in the post-production process on Destin Daniel Cretton’s “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” (we already assumed Tom Holland could end up doing more solo films, if they’re attractive enough, given he has more of a creative say these days on the projects). And there has long been an assumption that Holland will eventually return to the “Avengers” fold, with the following two upcoming pictures serving as more MCU crossover fodder for the character (the next solo Spidey installment is expected to feature both The Punisher and The Hulk alongside a slew of villains).
Rothman also laments “Spider-Man: No Way Home” not playing in China (the government controls which foreign films are played in theaters, which can be an arbitrary decision based on a wide range of factors, from threatening the political atmosphere to various cultural sensitivities) as the movie could have hit $2 billion with the added box office renuve, rather than being stick at $1.9 billion (Rothman’s quoted figure). One of the reports from Belloni’s own outlet, Puck News, from 2022, suggested that the sequence with the iconic Statue of Liberty (a considerable part of the landscape of New York City) was one of those sticking points, which the studio head confirmed cutting that part was sticking point with the censors and he didn’t want to have to explain that to Congress.
“Scarcity has value, you got to have the audience miss you…absence makes the heart grow fonder” is how Rothman put it when the topic of Marvel’s sort of decline became apparent, as there had been seen as an over-saturation between MCU projects on Disney+ and theaters. “Never bet against Jim Cameron, and never bet against Kevin Feige….certainly, [Marvel] has engaged, you can see it in a course correction, less television. I think it was really the television and the elaborateness of that interconnection that made you have to be SO inside or else you felt excluded, and that was a mandate he was given by a prior administration” (Of course, Rothman is alluding to Bob Chapek’s short-lived and meddlesome tenure at Disney which demanded a glut of TV content during the COVID streaming era).
He also confirmed there are plans at Sony to reboot the live-action Sonyverse/Spider-Verse world, after multiple hiccups such as “Morbius,” “Madame Web,” and “Kraven the Hunter” not exactly setting the world on fire, and reports of Sony scrapping future projects entirely. However, Rothman was vague and didn’t exactly reveal details about what that could look like (notably, “Venom” is getting a new animated film).
Doing another reset with their side of the Marvel roster isn’t such as stretch given Rothman’s previous history with superheroes as they would eventually at Fox attempt a successful soft-reboot with “X-Men: First Class” (Fox continued with “Days of Future Past,” “Apocalypse,” and lastly with “Dark Phoenix” before the Disney merger) after hiccups like “X-Men 3: The Last Stand” and “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” didn’t excite critics or fans as much as previous installments (Rothman would also oversee the long-forogtten misfire “Daredevil” spinoff film “Elektra”).
You can listen to the full second part of the interview between Rothman and The Town below.
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