It came as a huge shock to fans that Spider-Man was in the MCU no more thanks to the corporate split between Sony and Marvel. Though Tom Holland is expected to continue on as Peter Parker in further movies, we won’t see the web-slinger featuring in any more team-up films or being part of the Avengers again. All this might have been a shock to us, but to Avengers: Endgame directors the Russos, it was something they expected.
The brothers opened up about the Sony/Disney split while speaking with The Daily Beast recently and in doing so, they went over the process of how Spidey came to be in the MCU originally, recalling how they fought desperately to get him involved in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War.
Anthony Russo began by saying:
“We were extremely passionate about it. This is something we really wanted to happen, and fought a long time internally at Marvel to make it happen.”
Joe then went on to add that Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige worked hard to make the deal happen in the first place. As such, he’s well aware how the whole thing was balancing on a tight rope and is just glad that they were able to play with the character at all.
“It wasn’t easy. Kevin [Feige] went through a lot. There were a lot of ups and downs, and he kept walking into our office and we’d go, ‘Look, we’ve got to do it with [Sony],’ and he’d go, ‘OK, I’ll figure it out,’ and walk back into his. He was looking for the way out. He wanted to open that door and have us go, ‘We figured it out! We don’t need Spider-Man!’ because it’s a lot of work to get two major corporations to play nice with each other, and the fact that it happened at all, we should all be dancing and celebrating that we got that little bit of time.”
Finally, he concluded by saying that he and Anthony aren’t “devastated” by the news as they always knew this precarious arrangement wasn’t going to last forever.
“I think that’s why Joe and I are not so devastated or surprised that there’s been a falling-out, because it was so hard to make it happen in the first place.”
Fans have hoped that maybe negotiations will open up again between the two studios, but Sony’s latest statement on the matter has put the dampers on that. Like Russo says above, though, at least we had Spider-Man in the MCU for five movies – including the grand finale to the Infinity Saga, Avengers: Endgame.