I had a strange, yet tempting thought yesterday. We all know Marvel's "The Avengers" movie hits tomorrow in North America. We already know its going to be great. We also know there is going to be a new Spider-man movie, this time without Toby Maguire (a sigh of relief). But we already know the origin of Spidey, we covered that in the first Spider-Man movie. So why now? Why recreate and recast the series? Well if you are familiar with the current comic book series of the Avengers, you would know Spider-Man joined them. Yes, Peter Parker is in the Avengers now.
That's where my ears perked up. Could the Avengers 2 (God please let this be a real thing) feature the joining of Spider-Man? How awesome would that be?
Then I got thinking even further, who else could join them? Could the next Hulk movie be about Red Hulk? Or She-Hulk? The possibilities! I'm getting goosebumps just thinking about it!
Then after Avengers 2, let's get an Avengers X-men Crossover movie and make my life complete! Tommy out
I'm sorry if this has subsequently been explained to you, and doubly sorry if am the one to break this news to you, but it will probably never happen, or if it does it will be in tens of decades. It's all to do with the ownership rights and money, as you might expect.
ReplyDeleteThe previous three Sam Raimi Spider-man films and the new Amazing Spider-Man are all made by Sony, which means, obviously, that the film rights to Spider-man are owned by Sony, so all the money from ticket sales, and tie-in film merchandise, goes to Sony. However, the film rights to Avengers, and all the characters featured and movies that tie-in, are owned by Marvel Studios, which itself is owned by Disney. This means that that both Sony and Disney would have to collaborate to make this happen which would be a nightmare and financially pointless (they could make more money individually)
Obviously, the reason that Sony own the rights to Spider-Man in the first place is that Marvel, for obvious reasons, wanted a SM film out there but didn't have their own film production company in 2002, so sold them to the highest bidder. And, because it's made Sony a considerable pile of money, and is an established franchise, they won't sell it back.
Now their is some sort of time-lapse clause in the ownership of the film rights to Spider-Man. I do not know what it is exactly but it'll be something along the lines that the creative property (Spider-Man) will revert back to the original owners if the current owners do nothing with it for a period of time, for example I will say three years. What with SM being such a veritable cash-cow, Sony won't want to lose it. So they will have to churn out a Spider-Man film every three years or face losing a license to print money.
This is exactly the same for the X-Men, though slightly different. FOX, the production company behind all the X-Men films, own all the rights to X-Men characters. All of them. Every single one. That is an exceptional amount. They even owe the rights to the term 'mutant.' And that's why First Class was rushed out so that they didn't lose the rights to the X-Men back to Marvel. (Oddly though, FOX do not own the rights to Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, even though they are mutants and Magneto's kids, because they first appeared in The Avengers Vol. 2. So they could both be in an Avengers film, but if the word mutant or Magento were mention, Marvel Studios would owe money to FOX.) FOX also own the rights to the Fantastic Four, which is why they are hastily trying to reboot the franchise so they won't lose the rights to that too.
With this in mind, it's easy to imagine that neither FOX or Sony want to lose out and will fight 'tooth and nail' to keep their respective creative properties. They also won't make that much money working with Marvel Studios so a collaboration of any of the properties will almost certainly never happen.
There is a bright side to all of this. One: Marvel will never sell off film rights again. and Two: Marvel are currently in negotiations with, I believe it's Sony, to buy back the rights to Daredevil. If they're keen to do that, then they may have plans for him too. I love the character Daredevil so I'd love to seem Marvel Studios actually do something good with it.
As a final point to this, Warner Bros. own all the rights to everything DC. They are in a perfect position to make a JLA film, or start a DC Film Universe, with as many characters as that want, they just need to actually get their shit together. And they'd need to reboot Batman, so it would fit into a DC Film Universe, which, after the colossal success of Nolan's run, will not go down well.
I know all of that, it's just a geek fantasy. But, you should take that long comment and post it somewhere as a blog post, very well done sir :)
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