The Sony team is in the midst of figuring out how best to exploit its intellectual property across the film and television groups. And not just for its crown jewel, “Spider-Man,” but also in areas where it has a potential competitive advantage, such as its access to IP from PlayStation and Sony Music.
That said, the studio is aware of its association with one of the most popular Marvel characters of all time. So look for more amazing adventures of the web-slinger to populate not just theaters but TV screens.
“We have the next seven or eight years laid out as to what we’re going to do with that asset, and that will not only be on the film side — it’ll be on the TV side,” says Vinciquerra. “Our television group will have its own set of characters from within that universe that we will seek to develop.”
Sony is essentially internally auditioning its more than 900 Spider-Man-adjacent characters, to which it has attached the moniker Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters.
According to Hopkins, the team is “pretty far down the road in terms of working through which characters we think could be their own star of a series.”
Disney has long been drawing from the Marvel well. With its absorption of 21st Century Fox, the Burbank-based giant will soon have “Fantastic Four” and “X-Men,” leaving Sony as the only studio rival with licensing rights to Marvel characters.
“We’re developing a lot of Marvel-related content, and I think we’ll be out in the market very soon with something really, really big and transformational for us, because we’ve not done any shows with Marvel before, with Marvel IP,” says Hopkins. “So that’s a big piece of development that we’re onto.”
