With the surge in Marvel features in the last couple decades, the Marvel rights struggle has also been thrust into the spotlight.

Here’s the basic history: When Marvel Comics hit hard financial times in the 1990s, the company started selling off film rights to popular properties. That’s how Sony Pictures nabbed the rights to Spider-Man. Not a huge deal, until Marvel started churning out superhero flicks of their own. This created the separate-but-adjacent stories of Sony’s Spider-Man films and the rest of the MCU features.

As the Disney-Marvel Cinematic Universe grew in popularity, the company started negotiating deals to feature Sony’s Spider-Man in their projects. (See: Tom Holland’s Spider-Man in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.)

But as the Avengers assembled in the MCU, Sony kept expanding its own little Marvel universe. The studio premiered Venom in 2018. And now, the Sony Marvel features have their own official universe title: Sony’s Spider-Man Universe.

So the Sony movies have their own name now. What’s the big deal?

Well, it’s a bit less about how we refer to the films already in existence, and more about what this means for the future of Sony. 

Essentially, creating a specific name to refer to their Marvel films seems like a strong indicator Sony plans to continue to expand that universe in the future. In other words, fans can likely expect more Spider-Man films.

The studio already has a few new additions lined up to join Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. There’s the Venom sequel Let There Be Carnage, as well as Jared Leto’s Morbius. Plus the Into the Spider-Verse sequel, and of course, the MCU-blended project Spider-Man: No Way Home. These established projects, combined with Sony’s announcement of the official universe name, make their intent pretty clear: more Spider-Man universe features.

Plus, establishing these films as a specific universe implies they are interrelated. In other words… we’ve got crossover potential, people! Could Tom Holland and Tom Hardy share the screen in a Spider-Man and Venom flick? For now, we’ll have to wait and see. But you can learn more about how Sony and Marvel plan to divvy up their Spider-Man content here.

Exclusive: Sony/Marvel Split Spider-Man Into Two Separate Franchises

Source: Screen Rant