Marvel’s Civil War sends Sony scurrying over Spider-Man

With the news of talks between Marvel and Sony about Spiderman making a possible Captain America: Civil War appearance, it seems the cognitive wheels have been churning in the Sony camp. Namely entertaining the concept of following up Spidey’s appearance in Civil War with a movie in 2017, if it were to go ahead.

How do we know this? Sony and their ongoing relationship with hackers, of course. More emails from Amy Pascal of Sony Pictures have surfaced online. This is an excerpt from an email dated around October that was sent to a Matthew Tolmach:

I love introducing pp [Peter Parker] in cap but I know it comes with so many things since we won’t give them what they want what will we give them?

We can say it’s a cameo but I’ll bet it’s more and will involve some of his world and it will be peter and spidey right

Pascal also continues to mention in several memos that if the Spidey ‘cameo’ was to happen, they would ideally need to follow up with a Spiderman feature for 2017, which would mean starting shooting in Winter 2015 / 2016. This gives Sony very tight deadline, considering how many questions they have and mechanics involved between these two factions, succinctly shown in this Pascal memo:

cap thre only:
2. if we have spiderman in cap 3. what is our fee
and our back end. need script approval, casting approval of sm and aunt may and consultation of mays house in queens and any other spiderman locations we may need in future movies. also approval of new spiderman costume> how long is he is the movie? how closely does it follow the civil war story line? does the world find out who spiderman is? are there any other characters from the spiderman universe they are using? can we use one of the marvel characters in our future spiderman movies not produced by marvel.can we use cap to set up ss? can drew work with the russos to get this done? are we renting him out?

We hypothesised it would be a stretch that Sony would bend to Marvel’s timetable, but to not only get Spidey on Civil War, then follow up with a feature in 2017, whilst a lot of logistics have to be worked out before a hypothetical shoot date of Now / early 2016 can’t be good for great narrative and execution. We sure this and more will come up in the ‘Spider-Man Summit’ to be held by Sony to determine the future of the film franchise.

I would think the only way it would work would be for Marvel to push back their release date for the Cap. 3, giving time for deals / any script redrafts to be Ironed out (pun time), and the extra time would give Sony some manoeuvre room to start putting a Spidey feature together. That’s just our humble opinion. Or we may end up getting Sam Raimi and dancing Peters.

It should comfort you somewhat that even as Sam Raimi has been involved in talks with Sony, Marvel has been wanting to to distance themselves from the initial Spiderman trilogies and even the now Spiderman Andrew Garfield, much to Sony’s dismay.
Marvel is rumoured as stating also the romance elements in Spiderman have been greatly overdone and focus needed to move away from that and from origin stories and more towards a Spidey who is not a novice at the superhero game.

We can only wait for Sony to unknot their tangled web and secure their servers to hopefully get an official statement about whether Spider-Man will be turning up or going AWOL in Civil War.