Why Marvel Will Never Give Up On Spider-Man

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few months about how Marvel is treating its characters whose movie rights are owned by other studios. Depending on how much you believe, Marvel is either intentionally de-emphasizing the Fantastic Four and the X-Men or outright telling creators and licensing partners not to do anything else with those properties.

It makes sense from a business perspective, because Marvel would be better off having those rights back, and the only way that’s going to happen is if the other studios feel like it’s no longer profitable making films with those characters. Keeping the profile of those heroes as low as possible is the way to go if that’s the goal. But there’s one character Marvel will never treat that way, and that’s Spider-Man.

Maybe that’s obvious, since Spidey is arguably Marvel’s most famous super hero. For more concrete evidence, check out this licensing graphic that ran with a recent story on The Hollywood Reporter:

That shows that Spider-Man makes the most money in licensed sales of any super hero, and it’s not even close. Batman is almost neck and neck with the wall-crawler in North America, but when you add in the rest of the world, Spidey’s merchandising power is ridiculously strong.

Downplaying Spider-Man would be the Marvel equivalent of cutting off its nose to spite its face. Unfortunately, it means that even with Sony’s recent missteps with its movies, it’ll be difficult for the studio to completely run the brand into the ground. Peter Parker is just too popular.

What’s much more likely to happen is that Marvel and Sony use this kind of information to benefit both of them. I’m talking about sharing Spider-Man in some way, and I think that’ll happen at some point, probably after plenty of negotiations. But Marvel is never, ever going to put its chief money-maker on the back burner. Take that to the bank.

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