Details of the Spider-man Deal, What Happens to the Other Spin-off Projects?

Yesterday, the big news shocked the geek world. Spider-man will be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, yet still being owned by Sony. This is actually Sony's  agreement with Marvel that sees them maintaining ownership and creative control of the character while gaining exposure to the Marvel Studios fanbase as well as input from Feige, and Marvel studio's "think tank" which made their Marvel movies work. There are several details that have been revealed since yesterday, and questions that need to be answered; Questions and details that many of you might wanna find out. [hit the jump to continue]

For now, this is what we already know:
- A new Spider-Man movie will be released on July 28, 2017, co-produced by Marvel's Kevin Feige and Sony's Amy Pascal
- Sony Pictures will continue to finance, distribute, own, and have creative control of the Spider-Man films
- Before his new film, Spider-Man will first make an appearance in a movie in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, likely Captain America: Civil War
- Marvel and Sony are exploring opportunities to integrate other characers from the MCU into future Spider-Man movies
- We don’t yet know how long this “loan” of the character is contracted for and if there’s a limit to the amount of times Spider-Man can appear in MCU movies

THR has recently added some new details and revelations about the deal:

- Sony has final approval over casting (in keeping with the “creative control” clause), and that the studio is currently looking for an actor “much younger” than the 31-year-old Andrew Garfield, who will not be returning. Secondly, director Marc Webb—who helmed the two recent Amazing Spider-man movies—is also not returning. The sad part of this is that it is clear that what made the two previous Spider-man movies awful is the script and the story treatment is, really,

- Producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, the “gatekeepers” of the Spider-Man franchise for years, have been downgraded to executive producers and will have “no real say” in the creative direction of this new franchise. This is great news, because Arad was the one who steered the creative direction of the previous Spider-man movies to awful routes, and is also the reason why Sam Raimi quit the franchise.

- No money exchanged hands between Marvel Studios and Sony with regards to this deal. Variety says Sony will get more than 60% of the ticket sales, and since Marvel still owns the merchandising rights to the character, they stand to make a lot of money from toy sales from this new MCU-friendly Spider-Man.

- In terms of the long game, a source speculates to THR that this is the first step on Marvel’s behalf to eventually re-acquiring the rights to Spider-Man somewhere down the road, and another goes so far as to say that Disney could be positioning itself to buy Sony outright. On the other hand, it's still clear that Sony will hold on to this character for as long as possible, sources reveal that they turned down billions from Marvel to buy Spidey back. Sony still has to show us that they do know what to do with Spider-man though.

A scene from "The Amazing Spider-man 2" that teases the Sinister Six

As for the projects that Sony originally planned to release such as the "Venom" (to be directed by Alex Kurtzman) movie and the "Sinister Six" spinoff movie, well we have some weird news for that. As reported Variety, Sony is still moving forward with "Sinister Six", "Venom", and a film featuring female characters from the Spider-Man universe. The production details and target release dates are still unclear, which is a bad sign for them, because these are projects that seem to be just waiting to die out. The big casualty here is Drew Goddard, the promising director of "Cabin in the Woods" because he left the project "The Martian" and the Marvel/Netflicks TV series "Daredevil" to work on "Sinister Six"
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