The Hollywood Reporter recently hosted a roundtable discussion between studio executives. Matthew Belloni of THR moderated with participants Scott Stuber of Netflix, Jim Gianopulos of Paramount, Tom Rothman of Sony, Donna Langley of Universal, Toby Emmerich of Warner Brothers, Jennifer Salke of Amazon & Alan Horn of Walt Disney; a virtual “who’s who” of Hollywood power brokers in one room.
Now if you have an hour to kill, I strongly suggest you give it a view. It’s always cool to listen to Hollywood Big Shots discuss the state of the industry and Belloni does ask some good questions. However, I’m not here to discuss the entire roundtable. I’m here to talk about Spider-man.
During the roundtable, the topic of the Sony-Disney Spider-man deal was discussed. Unfortunately this didn’t prompt Horn and Rothman to start swinging metal chairs at each other like they were in a WWE pay-per-view. What we did get was a very candid Rothman saying he “hopes” the deal continues. He referred to the deal as a “win-win-win” for Sony, Disney and fans. Of course he dumped a little on the 24-hour news cycle, for blowing up the negotiations. I would expect some dumping since there were more than a few news outlets that took the typical ebb and flow of negotiations and ran around like their hair was on fire.
The take away from this is that it seems like the Disney and Sony studio bosses are happy with the overall deal. Sony keeps a major interest in the property and Disney gets a bit more than what they had. From my point of view, Spider-man has a decent catalogue of villains and stories and that can work in a stand-alone universe, but when you allow those characters and stories to unfold within the overall MCU it’s that much better.
Spider-Man 3 is set to be released July 16, 2021.
Thoughts? Opinions? I know someone out there in the Wasteland has either Rothman or Horns face on a dartboard. What do you think?
