Sony Has The Next Seven Years Laid Out For Their 'Spider-Man' Universes, In Both Film And TV
Sony is all-in on their Spider-Man films. After the success of both Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Venom, the studio has realized they don't necessarily need to rely solely on their deal with Marvel Studios to draw an audience. As a result, the studio has already planned the next seven years out for its Spidey-related projects – not just on film, but also on TV. And they have an official name for it all, to boot: Sony's Universe of Marvel Characters.
Variety has a profile on Sony, where they talk with Sony Pictures Entertainment chairman Tony Vinciquerra and Sony Pictures Television chairman Mike Hopkins about the shape of things to come. Within the story, Vinciquerra confirms that Sony has "the next seven or eight years laid out as to what we're going to do with [Sony's Universe of Marvel Characters], and that will not only be on the film side — it'll be on the TV side." Vinciquerra also adds: "Our television group will have its own set of characters from within that universe that we will seek to develop."
The studio has "900 Spider-Man-adjacent characters" to work with, which offers an entire universe of opportunity. Hopkins states that the team working on all of this is "pretty far down the road in terms of working through which characters we think could be their own star of a series." Hopkins goes on to say:
"We're developing a lot of Marvel-related content, and I think we'll be out in the market very soon with something really, really big and transformational for us, because we've not done any shows with Marvel before, with Marvel IP. So that's a big piece of development that we're onto...I think we aspire to have several shows in a universe that we create that can pollinate between each other, and to working with a partner to make that happen."
The partner Hopkins mentions could be Disney, since Sony is already working with them and Marvel Studios. But Hopkins also indicates the door is open to others as well, and that an official announcement should arrive in the coming months.
Into the Spider-Verse went a long way towards revealing how expansive the Spider-Man-based world could be. I wouldn't be surprised if every single character in Spider-Verse, from Spider-Ham to Spider-Man Noir, ends up with their own spin-off TV series or film. There's also been some talk of shows that follow in the footsteps of titles like Gotham and Agents of SHIELD – shows set in familiar comic book worlds that don't feature specific, familiar main characters.
On the film front, Sony already has Venom 2 lined-up, and they've just begun production on Morbius starring Jared Leto. There's a slight cyclical nature to all of this, since this has been Sony's plan all along. Back when the studio rebooted Spider-Man with The Amazing Spider-Man films, they had big dreams of spinning those films off into an entire cinematic universe, including a Sinister Six film that was heavily set-up by The Amazing Spider-Man 2. But Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed at the box office, and Sony's original plans for a Spider-Man cinematic universe fizzled with it. Now, they're giving it another go, with much stronger footing.