Thanks to the rights to certain Marvel Comics characters belonging to different movie studios, it has long been assumed that the chances of ever seeing a really complete Marvel Cinematic Universe are zero. While Marvel has retained the rights to big heroes like Iron Man, Thor, and Captain America, the X-Men and Fantastic Four are all over at 20th Century Fox, while Spider-Man has found a home at Sony. Because of the legal and business issues behind it all, there are very big walls blocking crossovers between universes – but if new rumors are to be believed, then it’s possible that one of those walls could be crumbling.
This rumor – with extra emphasis on rumor - comes from HitFix, which has heard mumblings that the relationship between Marvel Studios and Sony could get to a point where Spider-Man will be allowed to spin his webs while teaming up with characters from The Avengers. There aren’t any actual specifics mentioned, which makes it a big difficult to put a ton of stock in this story, but the report says that Sony is trying to "refocus" their big superhero franchise and that what could be involved is creating "some connections in the onscreen Marvel movie universe that would blow fandom's minds." Obviously nothing is anywhere near official at this point, but Marvel reportedly wants to have access to all of his characters and are willing to try and make it work on both a creative and corporate level.
The complexities that would be involved behind a deal like this make it a bit hard to speculate on how real it could actually be, but at the same time it’s not hard to figure out how all of it could go down. After all, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did not perform as well as expected at the box office, and the franchise could honestly use the bump that would come with being established as part of Marvel Studios’ cinematic universe (just look what it did for Guardians of the Galaxy). Regardless of what people think about the direction of the new Spider-Man universe, they would immediately get interested in it if the potential for a team-up with Avengers was possible.
And while there are some interesting story factors that prevent the continuity of the Amazing Spider-Man franchise from matching up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe (why didn’t Spider-Man help during/know about the Chitauri invasion in New York?), there are easy ways around that too. All they have to do is open up the idea of a larger cinematic multi-verse with all kinds of different timelines. Spider-Man can just do some inter-dimensional travel into Earth-199999 and the whole thing is solved.
We have long hoped that a crossover between Spider-Man and The Avengers would wind up being possible, but do you believe that it actually ever will? Let us know what you think in the comments section below.
