Early negotiations to bring Spider-Man into the MCU involved heated discussion and Sony’s executive Amy Pascal reportedly throwing a sandwich at Kevin Feige.
In the recently published book The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, authors Tara Bennett and Paul Terry investigate the history of the MCU, revealing some curious moments, like the encounters that allowed Spider-Man to jump into Feige’s narrative web.
As the book describes it, Feige had been a silent consultant for every Spider-Man movie produced by Sony, and someone Pascal liked to reach out with new ideas. As we can read in the book, the conflict between the two producers started during a lunch meeting, in which “Pascal wasted no time in expressing her strong desire to have Feige be more directly involved, creatively, in the making of Sony Pictures' The Amazing Spider-Man 3”. However, once Pascal revealed what the unproduced movie intended to do, the MCU producer quickly replied: “Amy, in all fairness, it's not gonna work.”
Pascal was surprised not only by the quick dismiss of what she thought were good ideas at the time but also by Feige’s counterproposal. Feige’s words, transcribed in the book, were:
“The only way I know how to do anything is to just do it entirely. So why don't you let us do it? Don't think of it as two studios. And don't think of it as giving another studio back the rights. No change of hands of rights. No change of hands of money. Just engage us to produce it. Just pretend it's like what DC did with Christopher Nolan. I'm not saying we're Nolan, but I am saying there is a production company that is doing this pretty well. Just engage the services of that production company to make the movie.”
As Pascal tells the book’s authors, “'At first, I was super resentful. I think I started crying and threw him out of my office, or threw a sandwich at him - I'm not sure which.” The strong reaction came from her fear that Spider-Man would be somehow taken out of Sony. But, given time, she also concluded that letting Feige produce a new version of the Web Crawler would be the best path to follow. As the book tells it:
Pascal called Feige back the next day after their lunch. The concept of a collaboration between Sony and Marvel Studios had not left her mind. After hearing his specific thoughts on what to do with Spider-Man in the MCU, she admits, “The idea of putting him up against a world where everybody had everything and he had nothing was a whole new way of telling his story. I thought, ‘Goddamn, that guy's smart.’”
And so 2017’s Spider-Man: Homecoming came to be, allowing fans to see the hero become an Avenger. Now, almost five years later, Sony and the MCU might be splitting up once again, as Spider-Man: No Way Home hits theaters on December 17, featuring Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, Jamie Foxx’s Electro, and Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, all villains from previous interactions with the Web Crawler. Consider that Tom Holland says that No Way Home feels like the final chapter in a franchise, and it looks like Spider-Man is ready to swing from the MCU to the SPUMC in the next film.
Besides that, with Venom: Let There Be Carnage shattering the barrier between the SPUMC and the MCU and Tom Hardy’s Venom reportedly making a cameo in Morbius, Sony is putting a lot of money and energy into the idea of a shared universe, which could work better with the inclusion of Holland’s Spider-Man. We’ll probably get a better idea of what happens next once Spider-Man: No Way Home shatters the Multiverse on December 17.