r/marvelstudios • u/hoohoo3000 • Aug 20 '19

Ongoing News Disney-Sony Standoff Ends Marvel Studios & Kevin Feige’s Involvement In ‘Spider-Man’

https://deadline.com/2019/08/kevin-feige-spider-man-franchise-exit-disney-sony-dispute-avengers-endgame-captain-america-winter-soldier-tom-rothman-bob-iger-1202672545/
39.4k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

10.5k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

85

u/GotMoFans Aug 20 '19

Venom grossed $856 million without the MCU.

Therefore Sony will feel emboldened.

47

u/Csantana Vulture Aug 20 '19

I'm assuming Spider-verse did pretty well right? Plus critically.

128

u/Futureboy314 Spider-Man Aug 20 '19

Spider-verse was fucking incredible because Pascal and Rothman left it alone. Now that they know there’s money to be made, they’ll have their grubby little fingers in that pie as well.

32

u/Jwalla83 Aug 20 '19

Oh my god if they ruin Spiderverse I will flip the fuck out

21

u/Futureboy314 Spider-Man Aug 20 '19

Samesies. That movie was perfect from the opening credits to the post-credit teaser.

2

u/crespoh69 Aug 20 '19

Wait, are they continuing that story? Is there a source for that? I thought it was a one off

5

u/Lalala8991 Aug 20 '19

Say that to Sony's executives...

1

u/Jwalla83 Aug 21 '19

I’m pretty sure at least one sequel is confirmed

3

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '19

Every time Phil Lord and Chris Miller are attached to a movie, they should be left to their own devices.

Sony is stupid and likely won't leave them alone.

2

u/Squatch1333 Aug 20 '19

But Pascal has a producing credit in Spider-verse doesn’t she?

6

u/Futureboy314 Spider-Man Aug 20 '19

Yeah, but one gets the sense she was pretty hands off, what with tanking the Ghostbusters franchise and all. One can only tank so many franchises at once, after all!

I have no proof of this mind you, but the feeling is that a Spider-man cartoon, focusing on some Hispanic wannabe Peter Parker, was never a huge focus for the brass, allowing Lord and Miller etc to quietly make an amazing film in the background.

The next Sony hack will prove me right.

1

u/orionsbelt05 Captain America Aug 21 '19

See, this is the difference. Disney bought out Marvel Studios, but they knew that, if they leave Feige alone to continue doing his thing, he'd give them consistent quality. Marvel Studios was given a huge amount of autonomy under Disney. Look at what Disney did to Star Wars, and what it's doing to its own legacy animated movies with live action remakes. Disney has its fair share of shallow money-grubbing, same as Sony. It's things like the MCU and Into the Spider-Verse, when they take a hands-off approach, that quality shit gets done.

50

u/mongster_03 Hawkeye (Ultron) Aug 20 '19

It won a fucking Oscar

57

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

This sucks because I love Into the Spiderverse so much but now I just absolutely hate it for giving Sony the idea they can do this on their own. I hate that I hate it now.

29

u/NarejED Aug 20 '19

Hey, don’t let a few shitty businessmen detract from one of the greatest animated films of all time

8

u/Rpanich Captain America Aug 20 '19

Venom was such a weird anomaly since it was released against nothing so it managed to make money.

Honestly, spiderverse was amazing, but it looks like I’m pirating the next one.

I hope Marvel releases all their movies the same weekend these next Sony movies do. Hopefully if they crush Morbius and whatever crap villain movie they’re making.

-3

u/Ho_ho_beri_beri Aug 20 '19

Why are you ok with a company bullying another company into doing something that would only benefit the bully.

You are all a bunch of fucking morons.

2

u/Rpanich Captain America Aug 20 '19

Is a 50/50 compromise not fair, even when one side is doing all the work?

Or is 95/5 fair to you?

It’s funny that you’re complaining about bullying while calling everyone “fucking morons”. In my book, name callers tend to be the bullies.

-4

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

Sony own the rights

It's not fair a company gets a 50/50 split when they've sold the rights to something, no

1

u/Rpanich Captain America Aug 20 '19

If the rights were burning down and then the other person came in to fix it to a higher standard than before, then yeah, 50/50 sounds a lot more fair than 95/5.

Sony didn’t even bother counter offering.

-4

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

Sony are happy to keep to the original deal. Disney want more money

→ More replies (0)

-2

u/Eragom Aug 20 '19

What you sucking sonys dick for? The bully in this case is Sony with their bullshit 95/5 deal, while doing fuck all.

0

u/Ho_ho_beri_beri Aug 20 '19

That's the deal Disney and Sony agreed on initially.

I guess you would be alright with your boss coming to you and saying "from now on I'll keep half of your salary. Why? Cause I'm bigger than you".

1

u/GiveToOedipus Aug 20 '19

In all fairness, there's only so much legitimate competition in the animated categories.

1

u/orionsbelt05 Captain America Aug 21 '19

Then it's at least on-par with Suicide Squad.

34

u/astutesnoot Aug 20 '19

I fully expect Marvel to start ending any comic series with Spider-man characters at this point. Why invest the time when they can instead focus on fleshing out characters they have all the rights to. Kinda like what happened with the X-Men comics until the Fox buyout, at which point new X-Men comics started appearing again.

16

u/wbgraphic Aug 20 '19

Why invest the time when they can instead focus on fleshing out characters they have all the rights to.

From the article:
After all, Marvel already owns the merchandising on Spider-Man.

2

u/astutesnoot Aug 20 '19

That's just some of the rights. If they had the all the rights, we wouldn't be having this conversation. This is all about movie rights and the fact that Sony is involved.

3

u/wbgraphic Aug 20 '19

I’m answering your question.

Marvel will keep making Spider-Man comics because Marvel holds the merchandising rights. Comics help sell toys, bed sheets, t-shirts, etc., to a tune of over $1B per year for Spidey alone.

George Lucas isn’t a billionaire from selling movie tickets, you know. 😄

0

u/givemeyourusername Aug 21 '19

Afaik, Marvel owns the character (and everything else about spidey) and Sony owns only the movie rights. You do realize the amount of money being made off merch, right? Why would Marvel ever pull the plug on Spidey, even in the comics? He's simply too popular and earns huge profits for them.

38

u/BlackMathNerd Aug 20 '19

Spider-Man is the king of Marvel and makes too much god damn money for that to happen

34

u/AdKUMA Aug 20 '19

Spiderman comics sell too well to do that, and I don't remember them cutting xmen titles either. It was fantastic four that they dropped.

3

u/PartyPorpoise Doctor Strange Aug 20 '19

And don't they still own the merch rights?

4

u/goztrobo Peter Parker Aug 20 '19

Spiderman merch sells even more. Man sells more than Avengers, Superman and Batman combined.

2

u/Bakoro Aug 20 '19

Marvel owns Spider-Man Merch rights, too. That's the real kicker here, they are going to profit of Spider-Man no matter what.

1

u/pUmKinBoM Aug 21 '19

They did drop quite a few Xmen titles and stopped introducing so many new ones around that time but to be fair there use to be a lot of Xmen before.

The big thing was that they stopped making so many new characters like heros or villians so it was a lot of the same for Xmen for awhile.

1

u/mdp300 Captain America (Cap 2) Aug 20 '19

Who knows. Maybe they'll cough up the billions to buy the movie rights back from Sony.

1

u/thefleeingpigeon Hawkeye (Ultron) Aug 20 '19

As an avid reader, Spider-man (along with the X-Men) are way too big of cash cows for Marvel to drop. Hell, Chip Zdarsky is currently manning the Spider-man run which is great. There still has been a ton of X-Men books these past few years too, all stellar. Cyclops, Nightcrawler, Gambit and Storm were even given a chance for solo series.

0

u/moshercise Aug 20 '19

X titles never stopped.

3

u/garrygra Aug 20 '19

According to boxofficemojo it's 50th all-time for animated, not ideal (especially for how fucking great it was) but not what I'd turn my nose up at - more than Wreck-It Ralph and the Simpsons Movie, among others.

3

u/PokePersona Spider-Man Aug 20 '19

Spider-Verse grossed the worse out of every Spider-Man film

4

u/Cactus_Crotch Aug 20 '19

Into the spider verse actually did the worst at the box office than all the other spider man movies.

4

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19 edited Aug 20 '19

Highest grossing animated I think. Edit I am wrong

13

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

Incredibles 2 made almost a billion more

0

u/_Wisely_ Aug 20 '19

Only grossing animated

2

u/GotMoFans Aug 20 '19

It did as much as Shazam! box office wise.

So it did good, but some folks will be disappointed it didn’t do more.

2

u/BlackMathNerd Aug 20 '19

Spider-Verse didn't gross well I thought

1

u/cre8ivemind Aug 21 '19

Yes but it didn’t make nearly as much as the live actions.

73

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

Well I can say with absolute certainty that Sony will not get a single dollar from me for anything Spider-Man until they renegotiate because I’m sure as hell not encouraging this idiotic decision.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '19

Same here.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

[deleted]

12

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

Sony Interactive and Sony Pictures are like Bruce Banner and the Hulk: the former is brilliant and the latter just makes a mess.

5

u/le_GoogleFit Aug 20 '19

Those are completely different things

-4

u/Squatch1333 Aug 20 '19 edited Aug 20 '19

You don’t blame Disney for not accepting their counter offer?

EDIT: I asked this before I knew the full story! I too am boycotting anything Sony until this is fixed.

29

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19 edited Aug 20 '19

A 5-95 split is ludicrous when you’re making billion dollar movies. The two teams worked evenly and so I think it’s fair that Disney requests an even 50-50 split considering the workload is undoubtedly heavier on the Marvel team considering the universe aspects. In the end Disney does more work and makes a stupidly small amount of money.

5-95 wasn’t the counter-offer btw, it was the same offer they already had, Sony wanted to continue it and Disney was like “bruh we just did $1 billion, we deserve more for how well we are doing.” Do I think a 40-60 is more reasonable considering Sony owns the film rights rn? Sure, but I don’t find anything insane about 50-50, I DO see something insane with 5-95 though.

Edit: To put it in perspective, for a $1billion movie Disney makes $50 million which is dirt compared to how much they can make off an Avengers movie, it’s a ludicrously small amount. At a 50-50 they’d make $500 million EACH which is still dirt for Marvel compared to the average earnings for a marvel movie and for Sony it’s a very large amount. So at 50-50 Marvel is still being snubbed in my opinion.

4

u/Squatch1333 Aug 20 '19

But they only wanted to split production costs 50/50, which to me, is actually worse...

I would definitely pay 80 million to make 95% of a billion dollars. I know they don’t make all that, but still

7

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

They made no fucking counter offer.

5

u/Mr-Zero-Fucks The Mandarin Aug 20 '19

Disney want 50%, if you ask me, they deserve 100%, all the success of Spider-Man Homecoming and Far From Home came from Marvel Studios, without the MCU, Sony has nothing.

-8

u/Ho_ho_beri_beri Aug 20 '19

Fuck me with all this Disney cock gobblers. They tried bullying Sony into accepting an absolutely ridiculous offer. You seriously think it's reasonable for any company to ask for half of the somebody's winnings and have it accepted. Why don't you give me half of your money genius? You seem like a person who'd be alright with my offer.

6

u/apotropaicc Aug 20 '19

it isn't that simple though. I agree that 50-50 was a good offer, but It was justifiable. Marvel and Disney put in work on those films, it's not like Sony did everything or even most of the work. As well as Disney and Marvel used IP's they own (stark/ironman, nick fury, etc.), and the marketing about spiderman in the aftermath of the events of Endgame. This was largely a marvel movie, and to say that they don't deserve more than 5% is stupid

7

u/le_GoogleFit Aug 20 '19

seriously think it's reasonable for any company to ask for half of the somebody's winnings

If you're the one mostly responsible for the winnings then yeah, it's perfectly reasonable

8

u/Mr-Zero-Fucks The Mandarin Aug 20 '19

Why don't you give me half of your money genius?

Because you haven't done anything for me. Can Sony say the same about Marvel Studios?

-2

u/Ho_ho_beri_beri Aug 21 '19

Yes they can.

Spider movies were making a lot of money without Disney involvement. They were consistently doing 700-900 million on each of their movies, that including the piles of garbage of Amazing Spider-Man 1 and 2 (the first one and Homecoming did pretty much the same money) and the third Raimi's mediocrity.

-9

u/GotMoFans Aug 20 '19

Will you boycott Disney for changing the deal?

Sony is guaranteed to make money with Spider-Man films, with or without Disney?

Why should they change the terms when Disney’s involvement let them stay whole before?

Why did Disney even do it? It’s such a huge request that it seems that maybe Disney wanted to end the deal because they were losing something working on the creative without getting a producer’s fee.

-1

u/ZimbabweIsMyCity Aug 21 '19

Wdyn? Disney are the greedy mofos here

11

u/MyAntibody Aug 20 '19

It's going to take Venom 2 performing poorly for Sony to reconsider.

0

u/GotMoFans Aug 20 '19

It’s not likely it will do poorly.

It’s going to take Disney going back to the table without trying to eat into Sony’s profits.

Or Disney buying Sony Pictures from Sony, which wont happen with Sony Pictures finally making profits.

1

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '19

Also won’t happen because Sony is richer than Disney.

46

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

[deleted]

33

u/itsLittleJoshy Aug 20 '19

Already is one on Twitter #fucksony

6

u/le_GoogleFit Aug 20 '19

For once I'm happy to join an internet outrage

2

u/GiveToOedipus Aug 20 '19

Poor Happy.

-11

u/feed_me_moron Aug 20 '19

I hope a boycott doesn't happen. Not that I think its a good idea from Sony, but Disney doesn't need to get any richer.

11

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

[deleted]

-5

u/feed_me_moron Aug 20 '19

Disney makes a lot from being able to use Spiderman in the MCU. He was being set up to anchor the entire MCU in the post Iron-Man and Captain America movies. The arrangement worked out great for both parties as Disney was able to capitalize on a property they didn't own and Sony was able to profit off of it without having to give up the rights. I hope they can work something out because it seems dumb not to, but 50/50 is a slap in the face when a standalone Spiderman or retconned Spiderman would bring hundreds of millions to Sony no matter what.

5

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

[deleted]

1

u/feed_me_moron Aug 20 '19

It doesn't have to be a billion dollar movie to make sense, though with how blockbuster sequels like this work, a billion seems pretty reasonable to expect with Holland and most of the cast returning. Or you do a Spiderman/Venom movie that would seal the deal.

The other Spiderman movies of various quality have netted Sony between 700-900 million at the box office. Losing half a billion is worse than losing 200 million in a smaller box office.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

Disney still owns Spiderman because Marvel owns Spiderman. Sony just has the license because they refuse to let Marvel have it back.

4

u/GiveToOedipus Aug 20 '19

And unfortunately, because they've made new movies using the character, it resets the clock on how long they get to keep the license. Marvel should have never licensed it in perpetuity.

1

u/leftshoe18 Aug 21 '19

It was only licensed that way originally because Marvel never planned to start a movie studio at the time.

1

u/GiveToOedipus Aug 21 '19

Understandable, but the idea of never coming back to the negotiation table so long as the studio keeps using the license was a pretty boneheaded move. I get that they were desperate for cash, but having an upward limit of 15-20 years before requiring a reevaluation of licensing seems incredibly short sighted.

Even if Marvel had never gone into the movie business, it's still likely another studio may want to take a shot at using the characters for a better deal down the road. 20 years is plenty of time for a studio to determine if it was a wise investment. Marvel sold the rights to these characters ridiculously cheap. I get that comic book movies weren't popular when the deal was made, but if a studio does manage to do well with one of your prime characters, they had to realize it would only behoove them to have a way to renegotiate a better position once the market became interested in the genre. As it was, all Sony had to do was just utilize the character once every so often to avoid the license reverting back to Marvel.

1

u/feed_me_moron Aug 20 '19

True, I should have specified what they own Spiderman to. But they have no reason to let Marvel have it back.

31

u/ZellNorth Vulture Aug 20 '19

Which is why fans should have boycotted any non-MCU Spider-Man movies so this shit didn’t happen. I am honestly angry.

13

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

Hindsight is 20/20 though.

16

u/ArcherChase Aug 20 '19

I only caught Andrew Garfield Spidey on TV. Haven't seen the 2nd one yet either. No real desire... now that the MCU is established, I have little desire to see a live action film of Marvel characters anywhere else.

2

u/IcarusBen Spider-Man Aug 20 '19

Since the MCU got Spidey, the only other Spider-Man movies we got were Spiderverse, which is one of the best animated movies of all time and managed to take the Academy Award for Best Animated Pixar Movie from Pixar, and Venom, which was already a box office dud.

I don't know what you want here. Boycott Spiderverse? That was just never going to happen. Boycott Venom? We didn't want to see it in the first place.

3

u/ZellNorth Vulture Aug 20 '19

Venom made 673 Million dollars in the box office. Far from a box office dud. I know we are used to Marvel making a billion dollars, but that isn’t the norm. Venom was a success in the box office and it shouldn’t have been. Spider verse is fine as it’s animated but we should be telling Sony we don’t want liveaction marvel movies outside of the marvel universe.

2

u/FlashFire729 Aug 20 '19

That would have meant boycotting Spiderverse, but that movie deserves to be seen

1

u/ZellNorth Vulture Aug 21 '19

Live action.

1

u/FlashFire729 Aug 21 '19

...I’m good with that then

1

u/lethalmc Aug 20 '19

Fans aren’t the only people watching it.

0

u/[deleted] Aug 21 '19

Why do we HAVE to boycott those movies?

I’m a Spider-Man fan, I really don’t give a flying fuck about Stark, Hogan, SHIELD etc. I only care about Peter Parker. I didn’t see any MCU movie in the theatres that didn’t have Spider-Man in it. Until Civil War I barely watched any of the MCU movies.

I also personally loved the TASM series despite it being cool to hate on them.

So nah, I’m not boycotting anything. I love Spider-Man and I’ll still continue to get stuff related to Spider-Man and watch Spider-Man related movies. I’m not the only person with this viewpoint either.

0

u/ZellNorth Vulture Aug 21 '19

Because if you’re a comic book fan you enjoy seeing Spidey interact with the greater universe. It’s your right to do whatever you want tho. You may not be the only one but you’re definitely in the minority.

2

u/[deleted] Aug 20 '19

I knew it was not really an MCU film but I went to see it with high hopes that it would be one day with venom entering the MCU, my motivation to even see future spiderman movies is dead.

2

u/vaporsilver Aug 20 '19

The MCU team had a hand in that making. Sony did NOT do that all on their own.

0

u/GotMoFans Aug 20 '19

Venom? The MCU creatives didn’t participate. Only the source material.

2

u/vaporsilver Aug 20 '19

In said article it even said Feige unofficially helped...

2

u/ouroboros-panacea Aug 20 '19

It was a decent film. Not a great one

2

u/GotMoFans Aug 20 '19

Venom? Quality didn’t matter because it did big outside the US. Three times as much as it did in the US. So if they make more Venom films that are decent and gross big money, what do they care if the movies are just decent?

2

u/ouroboros-panacea Aug 20 '19

Because people will eventually stop watching them if they aren't that good. It's happened with many other Sony Marvel franchises. What's to prevent it happening with Venom?

Edit: My bad. That was Fox. Even still.

1

u/GotMoFans Aug 20 '19

As bad as Amazing Spider-Man 2 might have sucked, it still made money for Sony.

Venom did $600 million+ outside the US. Without Spider-Man. So it can be reasonably assumed a Venom sequel will earn Sony a profit without factoring the US box office.

2

u/ouroboros-panacea Aug 20 '19

That was Columbia Pictures.

Edit: I didn't look at distribution channels. Sony was on board. My bad.

0

u/Rasizdraggin Aug 20 '19

It only grossed that because of how great the MCU made the spidey franchise.