It’s strange to think that there was a time when Marvel was in financial trouble. But this was the case back in 1996, when the company filed for bankruptcy and sold off the movie rights to some its most valuable assets. Among them was the jewel in its superhero crown–Spider-Man– sold to Sony Pictures.
While this was in an era before superhero movies were box office titans, within a few years, Sony had its first Spider-Man movie in production. The film, released in 2002 and directed by Sam Raimi, was a box office success, and was followed by two successful sequels. By the end of the decade Marvel had launched its own hugely popular superhero universe, but there was still one thing missing–everyone’s favourite wallcrawler.
This all changed after the commercial disappointment of 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, the second film in Sony’s new run of Spidey films. Plans for further spin-offs and sequels were abandoned, and a 2015 deal with Marvel parent company Disney ensured that Spider-Man could now feature in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
But just because Sony didn’t have live-action Spidey for a few years, it didn’t mean it had to stop making Spider-Man related films. That original 1996 deal wasn’t just for one character–it included hundreds of heroes and villains from decades of Spider-Man comic books. In 2017 Sony announced that it planned to make a movie based on Venom, the fan-favorite alien symbiote that previously appeared in Raimi’s Spider-Man 3. While there may have been some fans who wondered if a Venom movie without Spider-man could work, the $856 million worldwide box office gross proved that it definitely could.
Venom was followed by Spider-Man: Enter the Spider-Verse, an animated film that was both a huge commercial and critical success, as well as the winner of 2019’s Best Animated Movie Oscar. As a result, Sony has started development on a variety of Spider-man related movies and TV shows. It can be hard to keep track of exactly what is in the works, so we’ve rounded up all the announced and reported projects have been announced so far. Of course, not all these will necessarily happen–there have already been a couple of previously reported movies that have been cancelled or changed into different projects. But it’s very likely we’ll be watching films in the Spider-verse for many years to come.
