As it crosses the $570m at the US box office online, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers is finally slowing down, ahead of its September DVD and Blu-ray roll-out. That paves the way for the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man, which we’ve not seen yet, but keep hearing far better things about than you might expect.
However, while in the world of comics it’s been perfectly feasible for Spider-Man to join The Avengers, given that Marvel own the rights in that format, in movies, it’s a lot more complicated. That’s because the rights to Spider-Man movies were bought by Sony, a good few years before Marvel started making movies of its own. And with Disney now handling The Avengers, that’s two corporations, each with their own agendas, that have kept Spider-Man and The Avengers apart on the big screen for the time being.
But could things be changing?
Press junkets have begun in the US for The Amazing Spider-Man, and at one of them, producers Avi Arad and Matthew Tolmach addressed this very point. Firstly, they chatted about the planned Venom movie spin-off, although didn’t go into much detail about it (although Tolmach described it as a “cousin to Spider-Man”).
Then, though, Avi Arad talked about The Avengers. “Everything is possible”, he told Crave Online of Spider-Man crossing into an Avengers movie. “If something like that happens, it’s great for Disney, it’s great for Sony. If the right story comes in, we are now working on Venom first. It’s our first out. So our thinking is in the right direction. Avengers to me was an expected success so I never looked at it because Avengers was successful.”
Might there be a flicker of hope, then? Presumably, the ball is in Disney and Marvel's court to ask the question of Sony first. That said, Sony will inevitably want a slice of the financial action for agreeing, and you'd have to argue that, commercially at least, Marvel and Disney don't actually need Spider-Man in The Avengers 2. It's just us pesky fans that would want to see it.
You can read the full piece over at Crave, here.
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