By For the longest time, it was easy to mock all of Sony’s Marvel movies. The Amazing Spider-Man movies were passable at best and excessively bloated at worst. But after last year, Sony has been riding high with their Marvel adaptations. While by no means a critical masterpiece, Venom was one of the highest grossing movies of last year and Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse won several awards, including Best Animated Feature at the Oscars and more importantly our Golden Cage for Best Animated Movie. With all of that success, Sony made it abundantly clear that their Marvel adaptations aren’t going away anytime soon and may actually stretch out into the TV world.
In an interview with Variety, Sony Pictures Television Chairman, Mike Hopkins, details that since Sony’s huge successes with Marvel in 2018, they’re looking forward to an aggressive expansion of Marvel/Spider-Man content. According to Hopkins, Sony is already well into development on several projects that will be released over the span of seven or eight years. These projects wouldn’t be just limited to just Spider-Man, but any of his supporting cast and other parallel Spideys. Just imagine an Office-style show centered around life at the Daily Bugle starring J.K Simmons as J. Jonah Jameson. I would be sold in a heartbeat and watch every episode as they aired.
But that’s the interesting point in all of this; Hopkins made specific mention that Sony was looking to create Marvel TV shows in the future alongside their version of Marvel movies. We’re already aware that a sequel to Venom is in production as well as a handful of Spider-Verse spin-offs, but this is the first mention of any Marvel TV show that could be made by them. What’s even more interesting is that there is no specific network or streaming service planned for their shows, but an announcement may be coming in the next couple of months on these phantom shows.
The first obvious choice for where Sony’s Marvel shows could end up would be Disney’s upcoming Disney+ streaming service. If an announcement is going to be made in a few months, it would tie in nicely to when Disney+ is expected to launch and having a Spider-Man show ready for launch seems like a no brainer. They could also appear on ABC, but outside of those two options, I can’t really see any of Sony’s upcoming shows appearing on any network. Remember, even though Sony does technically own the license to Spider-Man, there probably is some input coming from The Mouse that would stop Sony’s shows from appearing on some platforms. I can’t imagine a world where after the purge of Marvel content from Netflix that Sony would choose them as the distributor, but stranger things have happened.
While no specific projects were announced in this interview, I’m hoping that we get more projects that have the time and effort placed into them as Spider-Verse did than get more projects that shouldn’t be as successful as they are like Venom.
“Inside Mike Hopkins’ Fiercely Independent Strategy for Sony Pictures Television” – Variety
