Sony is getting ready to expand their Spider-Man Spin-Off universe to the small screen. Last year saw the studio releaseVenomin theaters, which turned out to be a much larger success than anyone expected it to be, at least from a financial standpoint. We know they were already developing further movies using the Spider-Man characters they own the rights to, but now we have word that they’re also looking to make TV shows based on some of these characters as well.
This comes from Sony Pictures Television Chairman Mike Hopkins directly. Sony cut a deal with Marvel Studios to allow for Spider-Man to appear in theMarvel Cinematic Universemovies alongside his fellow Avengers a few years back. However, Sony still owns the rights to the character and the many characters tangentially related to him in the world of Marvel Comics. Believe it or not, that makes for roughly 900 characters. Hopkins, in a new interview, reveals they fully intend to make use of as many of them as they can. Here’s what he had to say about it.
“We have the next seven or eight years laid out as to what we’re going to do with that asset, and that will not only be on the film side, it’ll be on the TV side. Our television group will have its own set of characters from within that universe that we will seek to develop… [the team is] pretty far down the road in terms of working through which characters we think could be their own star of a series.”
Netflix had quite a bit of success withDaredeviland the rest of theirMarvel shows.Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.has done well on ABC, then there’s something likeThe Runawayson Hulu. Why not have aSilver Sableshow, for example, that has some hardcoreAliasvibes? Not to say that show, specifically, is in development, but there is no reason to think some of these Spidey-adjacent characters couldn’t carry a series. Mike Hopkins, speaking a bit further, seems bullish on the idea.
“We’re developing a lot of Marvel-related content, and I think we’ll be out in the market very soon with something really, really big and transformational for us, because we’ve not done any shows with Marvel before, with Marvel IP. So that’s a big piece of development that we’re onto.”
At the present time, there is no word on what characters could be getting TV shows. Not is it clear if they’re looking to develop live-action shows, animated shows, or both. Though, given the success ofSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, animated would make a lot of sense. Per Mike Hopkins' comments, these will be different characters from the ones who are possibly getting movies, so we can rule out Kraven the Hunter, Nightwatch, Black Cat andMorbius, which recently started filming with Jared Leto in the lead role. This news was first reported byVariety.
