By Arik Espinosa, staff writer
On Feb 9, Marvel and Sony announced that they will share the screen rights to Spider-Man. This means that Spider-Man will be allowed to be in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). The Wall-Crawler will be allowed to crossover to any of the future Marvel’s films like the Avengers. Sony and Marvel are now in production making a new Spider- Man film that will be released on July 28, 2017. Since they are making a new Spider-Man movie, Marvel had to push back the release dates for both Thor, Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and the Inhumans.
Before Disney bought out Marvel, the company didn’t have enough money to make movies about their characters such as the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, and Spider-Man. They sold the screen rights to Sony to make a Spider-Man movie, while the other franchises got sent to Fox. Sony made the first three Spider- Man movies with Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire. Then they rebooted the character with the Amazing Spider-Man and the Amazing Spider-Man 2. Since the failure of the last Amazing Spider-Man movie, Sony and Marvel had to come up with a deal to reenergized Spider-Man and have better stories to tell.
In order for Marvel to gain these rights back from Sony, they had to come to many compromises and agreements. Both parties do want to make a fresh start for the web-slinger, so they will not continue the Amazing Spider-man franchise. That means they won’t use Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker/Spider-Man. Marc Webb (who was the director of the Amazing Spider-Man) will be replaced by another director.
They were looking into five actors to play the Webhead: Dylan O’ Brien (who was in Maze Runner, and known in the TV series Teen Wolf), Logan Lerman (who starred in Fury and Percy Jackson.), Asa Butterfield, (Ender’ s Game, Hugo, and Merlin.), Devon Werkheiser (Nickelodeon‘s Ned’ s Declassified School Survival Guide, and recently featured in Franklin and Bash), and finally Zac Efron (who starred in the High School Musical movies and recently Neighbors).
Recent rumors suggest that Spider-Man in the MCU will be introduced as the Miles Morales Spider-man who was an African American teen that acquired the powers of Spider- Man, then became Spider-Man after Peter Parker died at the hands of the Green Goblin in the Ultimate Universe in the Marvel comics. Miles was on the TV show Ultimate Spider-Man and was voiced by Donald Glover whom they thought could be the new Spider-Man so that instead of using Peter Parker as Spider-Man for the third time with the same story, Marvel and Sony could instead start off with a fresh new face, a Spider-Man whose character and story are completely different and yet to be shown on the big screen.
However these are still rumors, nothing is certain on who will play Spider-man or if Spider-Man will be Peter Parker or Miles Morales.
What is certain is that Spider-Man will make his first appearance into the MCU in the movie Captain America: Civil War, which comes out around May 6, 2016. We only have a year to wait.