MovieChat Forums > Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) Discussion > Sony's Major Miscalculation

Sony's Major Miscalculation

posted 7 years ago by JediJones (235)
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They gave up exclusive rights to Spider-Man so that they could use MCU characters in their movie. This was a fundamental miscalculation. Every comic-book fan knows that Marvel uses Spider-Man as a guest star in other comic book titles to increase sales. But they NEVER need to use guest stars in Spider-Man's comic book to help HIS sales. Spider-Man has a deep bench of supporting characters and villains to draw on to hype up his own book. Guest stars actually have a way of detracting interest in Spider-Man issues because what Spider-Man fans really want to see is a deeper exploration of Spider-Man's own universe.

There was a comic book in the '70s called Marvel Team-Up, where every month Spider-Man would team up with another hero. Right there you see how much more valuable Spider-Man is as a character because he was chosen to be the anchor of the series. But this comic never sold as well as Spider-Man's own titles, Amazing and Spectacular. It was cancelled after 150 issues while Spider-Man's solo titles continued on.

We are now seeing this basic reality play out with the Homecoming movie. It is only going to gross about as much as the average take of the previous Spider-Man movies, both domestically and internationally. And if you bother to factor in important details like inflation and expanding global markets, it's going to be below average. Some of this can be attributed to them handling the Spider-Man character himself poorly. They made him more immature than any known version of the character when what fans were really ready for was the Spider-Man of the 1980s and beyond where he was out of school and an adult in the workforce. But it cannot be overlooked that adding Iron Man to this movie did NOTHING to expand its popularity. Sony must now seriously contemplate that using any more MCU characters in their Spider-Man movies would actually hold back their grosses instead of increasing them.

So their whole deal just went completely up in smoke. After their willful destruction of the Ghostbusters franchise last year and now their deal with the Marvel devil blowing up in their faces, Sony is going down in the books as the most incompetent movie studio in modern times.

[–] kirbyredd (61) 7 years ago

I feel Sony would be happy with the results of their Marvel Studios deal.
People soured on Garfield and the Amazing series. A third would probably have been lackluster at the box office (compared to others SM films).
Rebooting a 2nd time was already jeered at first, it was only the excitement of seeing Parker in the MCU that held fans at bay.
I really don't think another non-MCU Spidey film would've worked. This was their best option and I'd say they've made more money from it than if they'd gone it alone.