Extra, Extra!: Spider-Man joins the MCU

In which I report on the latest in entertainment news.

I didn't think that it was possible, but somehow Nintendo's announcement that they're going to be producing a live-action Legend of Zelda series for Netflix wasn't the biggest piece of entertainment news to hit this week.  Think about that for a second.  A live-action Zelda series was not the biggest thing to happen this week.

That's right: Spider-Man will finally be joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe after Sony's spent five films strangleholding his film rights.  This is honestly the most exciting thing that I've seen on the internet since that fake story about Fox selling back to rights to X-Men and the Fantastic Four to Marvel (seriously, check out that publication date).  And although the deal is a bit wordy, everything looks back on course for Spider-Man's cinematic run.

Spider-Man will be introduced to the MCU in a movie before July 28, 2017.  Why before that oddly specific date?  It's because that's when the next Spider-Man movie comes out.  And with the way that things currently stand, it's looking increasingly likely that he will appear in Captain America: Civil War, which is awesome, considering the key role that he played in the comic's storyline.  The other option (and the one that I'm actually hoping is the case) is that he'll be featured in post-credit sequence in one of the two remaining phase 2 films: either Ant-Man or Avengers: Age of Ultron.

Marvel and Sony will Co-Produce future Spider-Man movies.  It really should come as no surprise that, even in the fallout of the Sony hacks, the floundered release of The Interview and the increasingly bleak prospects for Sony's film department, that the company would not let go of their primary cinematic cash cow so easily.  They still want in on the highly lucrative superhero game.

But that's not to say that Marvel (and, by proxy, Disney) is going to let them have free reign over the character.  Kevin Feige - the Godfather of the MCU - will act as a producer to the films, lending his golden touch to the battered and increasingly tired franchise (which is exciting).  Amy Pascal, who oversaw the franchise since the first Spider-Man, will also stay on as a producer (which is far less exciting).

Sony will have final say over future Spider-Man movies.  While this is, on the surface at least, the most troubling caveat of the deal, it isn't quite so bad as it might at first appear to be.  Sony's in trouble, there's no question about that.  They've turned what is hands down my favorite Super-hero into a generally detested property (even if I don't think that all of the criticisms levied against it are fair).  Everybody's favorite wall-crawler, with his near instantaneous reboot and several truly dreadful films, was becoming as much of a joke as Meryl Streep at the Oscars: always coming back for more with increasingly dubious projects.

I think that Sony has the sense to lean on Kevin Feige's advice, given how he has transformed Marvel into the premiere superhero brand for the big screen.  Even though Sony gets the last word in all things Spider-Man, it's a safe bet that that word will echo whatever Feige ultimately suggests.

There's no word on Marc Webb, Andrew Garfield or The Amazing Spider-Man.  It seems pretty safe to assume, however, that the first two are out of a job and that the latter is going to be rebooted.  This is actually a real tragedy, because Webb did a great job at fixing the butchered remnants of the character after Raimi got through with him in Spider-Man 3 and Andrew Garfield was able to inject the fun, wit and sarcasm back into the character (three traits that, for me, always defined Peter Parker).  And it seems pretty sad to scrap the nascent franchise after the series finally seemed to find its footing and push it into a direction that looked to be working (even if the second film's absolute dedication to that made it as a single film far less than exciting).

That being said, although we're almost guaranteed a new Spider-Man in a new stand-alone franchise, I doubt that the 2017 film will be an origin story.  They've already announced that he will be introduced before that, likely as a fully realized Spider-Man who got around to superheroing in the aftermath of the Battle of New York.  How the events of The Avengers will play into his character is perhaps the most intriguing question of all.

So what are your thoughts about the announcement?  Will you be sad to see The Amazing Spider-Man get abandoned just when it seemed to find its footing, or will you just be happy to see Spider-Man where he truly belongs?  Who should play the presumably rebooted web-crawler?  How should the character be introduced in the MCU?  Let me know in the comments section below.

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