Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Success Proves Fox Needs To Work With Marvel on Fantastic Four

Spider-Man: Homecoming is a big hit for Sony and Disney/Marvel. It’s not necessarily a “runaway” hit, having suffered a steep box-office drop once the well-reviewed War For The Planet of The Apes opened on its second weekend and otherwise seeing a lower opening than fellow Marvel Cinematic Universe entry Guardians of The Galaxy Vol. 2 or the sustained mega-success of Wonder Woman. But it’s a big hit all the same, garnering a better reception with audiences and critics than the disappointing Amazing Spider-Man duology and leaving even more underwhelmed fans to concede that Tom Holland has a solid career of webslinging ahead of him.


Its success is all the more impressive when one considers that, even though it was Marvel Studios that (reportedly) called most of the shots and did most of the heavy lifting on the hotly-anticipated co-production, the film is being counted as a big win for beleaguered Sony Pictures. The financially-troubled studio, which saw its senior leadership toppled by a string of box-office underperformers and a humiliating email-hacking scandal over the last several years, was badly in need of a hit and had entered into a once-unthinkable partnership with Marvel in order to salvage the long-term viability of the once-invincible Spider-Manbrand – which Sony officially retains the film rights to even as the character is now living under shared-custody with Marvel-proper.

What a difference a weekend makes, though: Sony now finds its fortunes looking (for now, at least) interestingly re-aligned. Devout Marvel fans may still be bracing at the thought of the studio’s plans to create a series of spin-off features around C-listSpider-Man supporting players of dubious connection to the “real” Marvel Universe, but such plans are now being talked about as high-profile eventualities as opposed to theoretical “hail Mary” moves that characterized their original conception. Whether or not nagging rumors that the studio is still mainly trying to look as prolific as possible in order to attract potential buyers (parent company Sony Inc. of Japan has been thought to be wanting out of the movie business), the fact is they look better as a prospect now than they did even a month ago.

In any case, if Sony’s “if you can’t beat em, join em” approach to competing in the Marvel Age of movie making now looks like it’s (in the short term, at least) working out for Sony, then the question soon becomes whether other studios having trouble making their Marvel-adjacent blockbusters “work” should consider a similar approach – maybe even studios like Twentieth Century Fox.