Just four years ago, Sony’s once-mighty Spider-Man franchise was dangling by a thread. The studio had acquired the rights to Marvel Comics’ most popular and profitable superhero in 1999, turning that $7 million deal into a groundbreaking, Sam Raimi-directed, Tobey Maguire-starring trilogy that set new standards for blockbuster earnings—and ushered in a new era of box-office-dominating superheroes. But by November 2014, both Sony and its chief Amy Pascal—the woman who helped broker that original deal—were stymied, thanks to the underwhelming critical and fan reaction to The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (starring Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone).
Then came another blow: a company-wide hack that exposed secrets, personal communications, and film concepts still in their infancy to a public eager to mock. Future Spider-plans quickly unraveled, and Pascal was soon out of a job—though she did manage to keep Spider-Man in her stable as she transitioned into producing.
Unbeknownst to her, Spider-Man’s salvation was making its debut just a few weeks before the hack. Dan Slott’s Spider-Verse comic-book story line hit the stands that year, blowing open the possibilities for an endless roster of super-powered web-slingers—and eventually helping to inspire the studio’s latest superhero adventure: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Between that film’s mounting Oscar buzz, the commercial and critical triumph of Spider-Man: Homecoming, and a massive box-office coup for Tom Hardy’s live-action Venom—Spider-Man, Sony, and Pascal are now back on top. So, where will they swing next?
“There’s a world in which everything comes together,” Pascal said over the phone last Friday night. “But that’s not something we can talk about yet.”
It’s impossible to tell the story of Spider-Man’s new era without mentioning another big change. As the 2014 Sony e-mail hack revealed, Marvel Studios chief Kevin Feige—who once worked with Pascal on Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man—had been gently sniffing around to see if he might broker a deal to bring Peter Parker into Disney’s wildly successful Marvel Cinematic Universe. Pascal was reportedly reluctant to relinquish her baby; the deal was so unstable that Captain America: Civil War screenwriters Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely had to leave a blank space in their screenplay, at Feige’s instruction, just in case Spider-Man ended up coming home.
By February 2015, it was finally official: Marvel and Sony had brokered a complicated joint-custody deal that would use the Avengers to launch Tom Holland’s younger, more earnest take on Parker in three M.C.U. films. Holland would also star in a trilogy of films co-produced by Marvel Studios and Sony, with Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark dropping by to give the new franchise a star-powered boost. The deal was a smashing success; Holland swiftly became the emotional core of the decade-in-the-making Avengers: Infinity War, and Sony used the success of Holland’s debut to make further plans.
But Marvel and Sony’s Spider-Man deal is densely complicated, and restricts what Sony can do with the live-action Spider-Verse. Animation, however, is a different story.
Even before the hack and the Marvel deal changed the game, Sony and Pascal were eager to team up once more with Phil Lord and Chris Miller, who got their start working with Pascal on films like Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 21 Jump Street. The studio offered them the animated Spider-Man project and, in turn, the pair pitched Sony a story centered on the first black Spider-Man (technically half-black, half-Latino), Miles Morales—a relatively new comic-book creation, inspired, in part, by actor Donald Glover and the fan-driven campaign to have him play the role that eventually went to Andrew Garfield in the second live-action Spider-series.
Lord and Miller said they came up with the idea of having an older Peter Parker mentor Miles on their own—but when they discovered Slott’s Spider-Verse, they were inspired to add several more Spider-People to the mix. “We lucked out,” Lord said. “Someone had done the work for us.”
Though Lord has the main screenwriting credit on Into the Spider-Verse, he insists the process was a fluid and collaborative one involving Miller, other producers, comic-book writers, and the film’s three directors: Peter Ramsey, Bob Persichetti, and Rodney Rothman. Much of the film took shape over a long text message chain between the directors and producers. Jokes were scribbled last minute on Post-its, or simply tried on the fly at the microphone. The script writing wasn’t finished until just a few weeks before the premiere.
Pascal, for her part, said the smartest thing she did was keep quiet and out of their way. Though Lord and Miller’s loose, improvisational style caused a much-publicized rift with Lucasfilm—who very publicly fired them from the Han Solo origin story Solo in 2017—it was perfectly suited to the world of animation, where experimentation and alt-takes aren’t nearly so costly.
The resulting screenplay is not only a riot, it’s exceedingly useful for Sony’s future franchising plans. Drawing from Slott’s story line, in which multiple Spider-powered characters from different dimensions team up to combat evil, Into the Spider-Verse opens up a galaxy of possibilities—and unshackles Sony from the continuity concerns that can weigh down other massive superhero endeavors. Sony’s licensing deal with Marvel includes rights to roughly 900 characters—and Pascal sounded downright giddy when she spoke about the potential for “all kinds of stories and worlds that can happen simultaneously.”
There’s still some caution around flooding the market with Spider-People; Lord considered crowding as many as 10 more of them into Spider-Verse, but ultimately nixed the idea so that Miles’s origin story wasn’t diluted. Then again, each of the Spider-People who do join Miles—Peter Parker, Spider-Gwen, Spider-Noir, Spider-Ham, and Peni Parker—are also primed to potentially lead their own standalone Spider-Universe project, broadening the franchise across age, gender, and global brackets in the process. Peni Parker could easily launch an all-anime Spider-movie; Spider-Noir could get his own moody, black-and-white production. The producers are especially thrilled by the spin-off potential of John Mulaney’s Looney Tunes–esque Spider-Ham: “Of course! You can imagine how much the kids love that character,” Pascal explained. “Yeah,” longtime Spider-Man producer Avi Arad added. “We want piggy.”
First, though, one of Pascal’s favorites, Gwen Stacy, will lead the way. The producer revealed that Sony’s upcoming Into the Spider-Verse sequel, directed by Joaquim Dos Santos (Avatar: The Last Airbender, Voltron) and written by David Callaham (Wonder Woman 1984, Zombieland 2), will be focused on Miles Morales and Gwen Stacy—and will explore a romance between the two, a thread from Lord’s original script that ultimately didn’t fit in Into the Spider-Verse.
Spider-Gwen’s transformation from love interest to friend and hero first may have had something to do with another Gwen Stacy advocate, producer Christina Steinberg, joining the Spider team. “I will say that Christina kept us honest,” Lord admits. “As five boys making a movie, it was really good to have another filmmaker there going, ‘I don't think you guys want to do it like this.’”
The Gwen and Miles adventure will serve as a launching pad for another Gwen-centric tale: Pascal also confirmed that a previously announced Spider-Women spin-off, written by Bek Smith, will feature Spider-Gwen and Cindy Moon (a.k.a. Silk) as well as Jessica Drew (a.k.a. Spider-Woman). Elsewhere at Sony, a live-action Silk film is reportedly already in early development.
These two new film concepts are taken directly from recent runs of the Marvel comics, part of a wider mandate at Columbia Pictures to stay true to the source material. As Pascal said, “I think it’s great that we’re going to be able to tell movies about female superheroes in this realm, and in the live-action realm as well, because I believe that there are going to be characters that really resonate for people. They’re funny and quirky and different, and heroic in all kinds of different ways that only animation allows you to do.”
Though Pascal and the rest are still waiting to see how Into the Spider-Verse fares at the box office, its awards-friendly buzz—coupled with the outsized success of Venom—means that Pascal’s previously shelved plans for Spider-Man could actually come to fruition in the live-action domain as well. Sinister Six, an all-Spider-Man-villain team-up movie based on an old script by Drew Goddard, is very much alive in Pascal’s mind: “I’m just waiting for Drew to be ready to direct it. I would do anything with Drew Goddard. I’m just waiting for him to tell me he wants to,” she said. Goddard himself seemed game as recently as October.
2014 whispers about a potential prequel centered on Peter Parker’s mild-mannered Aunt May were once considered “silly” by the studio, and laughed at by Sally Field, who played the role in the Amazing Spider-Man movies. But four years later, after Marisa Tomei’s young, hip take on the character for Marvel Studios—and Lily Tomlin’s wry animated turn in Into the Spider-Verse—an Aunt May spin-off suddenly doesn’t sound so crazy.
“Yeah, no kidding,” Lord said. “Once you open up your mind to alternate universes,” Miller added, “and it doesn’t have to be canon, then you’re a little more forgiving to try thought experiments that could be fun or interesting. Lily Tomlin did an amazing job—the idea was that she would be the Q to Spider-Man’s Bond in this universe.” That fresh take was a hit with the Marvel comics crew as well. “Lily Tomlin’s voice is now my Aunt May in my head,” said Slott—who is so reinvigorated by Into the Spider-Verse that he says he wants to start writing Spider-Man comics again.
When Pascal speaks of the October surprise that was Venom’s record-breaking box office, she does so with pride, but no sense of ownership. She thinks Venom is “amazing” and called its marketing campaign “brilliant,” but Eddie Brock isn’t her baby the way Spider-Man is. Columbia Pictures president Sanford Panitch is the one overseeing what has been called, internally, Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters, or S.U.M.C.
In fact, Pascal was pretty firm that the animated Spider-Verse and the live-action S.U.M.C. are wholly distinct: “Just look at what the Green Goblin is in Into the Spider-Verse, as opposed to the Green Goblin that we did with Sam Raimi,” she said. Should Sony proceed with both its planned S.U.M.C. Silk film and the animated Spider-Woman team-up Pascal mentioned, the two depictions would be “as different as Doc Ock in Spider-Verse and Doc Ock as Alfred Molina.”
But Dan Slott, who created the character of Silk on the page, pointed out that the animated universe can help the live-action realm, and vice-versa. He sees a world in which an all-female team-up cartoon inspires girls to “have Silk action figures and Silk t-shirts. You could then turn around and do a Silk live-action movie, because you’ve then, on some level, done a world-wide publicity campaign for Silk.” Pascal generally agreed; she said that the animated and live-action Spider franchises simply “make each other better and bigger.”
Along with Silk and Venom, the S.U.M.C. has a Morbius project in the works—starring Jared Leto as the titular vampire and frequent Spider-Man nemesis—and is in the process of developing movies on a wide range of additional heroes, anti-heroes, and villains, like Kraven the Hunter, Jackpot, Nightwatch, Black Cat, Sable, and, if the Venom end of credits are to be believed, Carnage. It’s a decidedly mixed bag of characters, and Venom, with its wild swings in tone from slapstick comedy to overly serious body horror, doesn’t exactly provide a blueprint of what to expect. Will the S.U.M.C. end up matching the upbeat vibe of both Holland’s Spider-Man and Into the Spider-Verse? Or is something much grimmer in store?
For her part, Pascal zeroed in on the moment when the Venom film’s split personality congealed into a crowd-pleasing hit: “When he gets in the tub with all those lobsters in the restaurant, I thought that was a pretty perfect, zany tone.” Venom’s wacky home-video marketing campaign and its post-credits sequence also indicate that Sony knows in the future, it should lighten up. The film’s PG-13 rating prompted some fans to wonder if the notoriously blood-thirsty Venom has been toned down in order to allow a future team-up with Holland’s Peter Parker—something the filmmakers have denied. But if that pairing ever does happen, it would be years in the future, after Holland’s Marvel contract expires. In fact, the S.U.M.C. moved Brock out of his usual haunts in New York City all the way to San Francisco, presumably, to get him off of Peter Parker’s turf.
The bigger question here, then, is what will happen to the Sony-Marvel Studios collaboration when their initial deal expires.
“I think about crying,” Pascal said of a future in which Spider-Man and Marvel retreat to separate corners. “I can only hope for a future where things work out. I've known Kevin since he was Avi's very, very quiet assistant, who for many years sat in that room listening to us and being so much smarter than any of us without any of us realizing. I will say that working with Marvel has been one of the highlights of my professional career.”
After the initial custody dispute over Spider-Man, Pascal and Feige’s working relationship has reportedly been convivial; in fact, Feige gave her thorough, friendly notes and feedback on her earlier Spider-Man films long before Marvel was legally on the hook to do so. And their joint deal has certainly been financially lucrative for both companies. But the union hasn’t come without its sticky complications: Sony’s insistence that Holland’s second stand-alone film, Far from Home, be released in 2019 threw a wrench in Marvel’s preferred degree of secrecy around Avengers: Endgame, for instance.
But regardless of whether Feige and Pascal continue to collaborate officially, it seems like the woman who has been watching cinematic Spider-Man grow from his infancy has learned a very valuable lesson from her time with the M.C.U.—and is the first to acknowledge missteps in the past. The key to the Spider-Verse, she said, is “character and emotion. That is the thing that makes all of Marvel so rich, and that’s what Stan Lee did—and I think that is the most important thing is never to forget that, never to get confused that it’s about anything else.”
Lord, meanwhile, said that this new, animated Spider-Verse “helps hone in on what the unifying themes of the Spider stories are,” by dint of repeated origins and multiple Spider permutations. Perhaps most crucially, though, it honors Lee’s original vision. As Slott pointed out, just a few years after the Sony hack revealed a narrow definition of what studios thought Spider-Man had to be (white, straight, male), we’re suddenly in an era where the question has become what can’t Spider-Man be: “Stan always said that one of the things that was so alluring about Spider-Man for readers was the mask. Anyone could have gotten bitten by the spider, anyone could be under the mask. When you see that character running around, you can associate with it.” And soon, no matter how you identify, Pascal may have a Spider-movie tailored directly to you.
