Sony may have dropped the ball on two Spider-Man franchise already, and threatened to do it for a third time in the summer of 2019 when it looked as though Tom Holland’s web-slinger was going to be forcibly withdrawn from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but the studio are happy to give Kevin Feige’s team credit where credit is due.
It was recently revealed that the architect of the MCU gathered his troops for a covert meeting to spring a surprise on Sony’s Amy Pascal when she was meeting him to discuss The Amazing Spider-Man 3. Instead of talking about Andrew Garfield’s threequel, Marvel’s president of production surprised her with a pitch to reboot the comic book icon and re-debut him as part of his own mythology, and we all know how that turned out in the end.
New book The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe via ComicBook finds Pascal in a reflective mood, where she names two things she loves about the MCU’s version of Spider-Man that her own outfit was unable to bring to the table.
“The first idea was that the eyes of his mask move. That’s everything. We have never been able to know Peter Parker inside the Spider-Man suit. It’s like Peter Parker disappears into a CG character, and then you don’t care. Knowing how a character is feeling is everything. the other thing is that Tony Stark’s made him a suit. We’ve always had to believe that Peter Parker invented this suit on a Singer sewing machine, and we just kind of went with it. Now we don’t have to do that anymore.”
Everything in the MCU is connected to Tony Stark in one way or another, so it made sense for him to take fellow genius and technological innovator Peter Parker under his wing. Advances in CGI have also given Spider-Man much more of a personality when he’s under the suit thanks to those expressive eyes mentioned by Pascal, and fans will be hoping the association between Marvel and Sony continues on for a long time to come.