Listen, Bud, he's got radioactive blood!

 In A Zen Master in Oz and The Martian Invasion of Oz we meet Captain Pug, who explores the multiverse from the helm of his reality hopping steam ship, The Laughing Tortoise.
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Another hero has been in the news lately on account of doing his own leaping from one reality to the next.

Our hero!

The internet has been whipped its collective self into a tizzy over the news that Spiderman will be appearing in the superhero blockbusters produced by Marvel/Disney. Prior to the announcement this week by Sony Pictures and Marvel that the Web Head will be hanging out with Captain America and the Black Widow on screen, such a prospect was a pipe dream for fans of the Marvel comic books and films.
The path towards this announcement is pretty twisty (as I supposed any journey from one universe to another should be). It starts in about 1984, when legendary low-budget film maker Roger Corman was able to secure the film rights for Spiderman from Marvel Comics. Unable to get his web slinger flick off the ground, Corman let the rights to the property lapse.

Corman says "hi".

In 1985, mid-budget studio Cannon Films, headed up by shlock peddling Israeli cousins Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus (if those are not the names for a couple of super villians, what is?), secured the rights to Spiderman, with the understanding that if a film did not appear by 1990, the rights would revert back to Marvel.

Golan/Globus have some time shares they want to sell you.

The cousins did not have a clue about the character and thought they were going to make a horror film. So, they hired legendary horror director Tobe Hooper (Texas Chainsaw Massacre1-2 and Poltergeist to name a few). Hiring Hooper seems to be about the only good idea Cannon Films managed to have. Golan/Globus commissioned a script in which Peter Parker gets the ability to transform into an eight-armed spider mutant and spends the film fighting an army of other animal themed mutant monsters. 


Freaked out by what was about to happen to his most famous creation on the big screen, Stan Lee stepped in and forced a new script to be commissioned that would more faithfully adapt the comic book character. Golan/Globus had a new script that now featured a much more familiar Peter Parker in college gaining his powers in the same accident that gives Doctor Octopus his. While this sounds like it might be on the right track, the fact that low-rent action hack Joe Zito was hired on as director is evidence that this would have been a pretty bad movie.

This is the kind of magic Joe Zito creates!

That bullet was dodged by all Spiderman fans when the budget for the proposed Zito-helmed flick was cut significantly due to Cannon losing a fortune on the failures of Superman IV and Masters of the Universe (a movie that we here at the Emerald City Zen Center have a great deal of undue affection for). This caused Zito to leave the project, making room for the king of modern day low-budget crap cinema, Albert Pyun.

This is Pyun's really terrible Captain America. What atrocity would he have inflicted on Spidey?

Before what could have been the worst superhero movie ever could be made, Cannon went bankrupt I 1989 and Golan/Globus split up. As part of the split, the company that bought Cannon gave Golan 21st Century Film Corporation and the movie rights to Spider-Man and Captain America.


Wanting to make good on this really excellent severance, Golan continued his efforts to get a Spider-Man picture made. In 1990 he managed to bring together up and coming independent film studio Carolco Pictures and big Hollywood studio Columbia  Pictures for a big budget adaptation of the comics, to be written and directed by James Cameron, that would have featured some seriously PG-13 language and a steamy sex scene between Peter Parker and Mary Jane. Carolco was so jazzed about the proposed film that in 1992 they paid Marvel to extend Golan's film rights for Spider-Man character up to 1996.

James Cameron also knows where Jesus is buried. For real!

It looked like smooth sailing, but everything was derailed in the courts. As part of his contract, Cameron had the right to determine who received credit on his movie and he did not want Golan's name on it. In retaliation, Golan sued Carolco and Columbia. 20th Century Fox got into the game by suing Carolco and Columbia for using Cameron, because they believed he had an exclusive agreement with them. 21st Century Films and Carolco went bankrupt. MGM bought the assets of 21st Century Films and sued Viacom (who had bought Carolco's assets) and Marvel. Needless to say, no movie got made and in 1998 the courts gave the film rights to Spiderman back to Marvel.


In 1999, Marvel sold the film rights to Spiderman to Columbia, now owned by Sony. MGM intervened and threatened legal action, since it still considered itself the legal owner to the film rights. MGM and Sony then cut a deal in which Sony would give up its attempts to make its own James Bond film series and MGM would lay off its Spider-Man claims.

Admit it, you totally thought this was kind of hot when you first saw it.

With the legal wrangling out of the way, Sony pushed forward with its movies and finally, in 2002 (18 years after this saga began) Sam Raimi's pretty much excellent Spider-Man was released to huge box office returns. This was followed by Raimi's awesome Spider-Man II (2004) and the not-really-all-that great-at-all, but not as bad as some people make out, Spider-Man III (2007).

Yeah, the Green Goblin in these movies does look pretty goofy.

Meanwhile, Marvel set up its own film studio and got out of the business of licensing its characters to other studios. The first film it released, Iron Man (2008), was way better than anyone could have anticipated and laid the ground work for a series of faithful adaptions of Marvel characters to the screen, all of which occurring in the same shared universe, the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU). Each film put out by Marvel has been pretty damned good, except for Iron Man II, which is really problematic.

They turned this into cinematic gold, what can they do with Peter Parker?

Marvel was striking gold for itself with films about Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Hulk, Sony was fumbling the ball pretty badly. In 2010, the cancelled Sam Raimi's proposed Spider-Man IV and announced that they were going to reboot the franchise with the aim of creating an expansive universe based around Spider-Man and his supporting cast, with spinoffs etc. coming to a theatre near you in order to emulate the MCU.

Are they about to kiss? Now, that would be an interesting movie!

The result of this was 2012's thoroughly forgettable The Amazing Spider-Man, perhaps only notable for its excellent casting. While not as successful as the previous Raimi films, Sony remained optimistic and brought back director Marc Webb to make the universally panned The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and announced plans for a spinoff film starring the Spider-Man villains The Sinister Six. Unfortunately for Sony, the second Amazing Spider-Man film did not generate the money anticipated, throwing all of the studio's Spider-Man Cinematic Universe plans into chaos.

This is why you get to watch a movie with Spider-Man joining The Avengers!

Meawhile, Sony was producing another movie titled The Interview (2014), starring James Franco (who played Harry Osborn in the Raimi Spider-Man movies) and Seth Rogen, who was also the co-director and writer. The premise of the film is that two goofball American journalist get enlisted by the CIA to kill North Korean despot Kim Jung-un. When North Korea's Supreme Leader heard about the movie, he lost his shit. He saw the fact that a Japanese company funding an American film about his assassination as an act of war. In retaliation he had hackers break into Sony Pictures' computers and leak all sorts of information about the goings on of the studio onto the internet. In retaliation for an attack on an American film studio, The American government used its own hackers to shut down access to the internet in all of North Korea.

"Tell everyone on Ain't It Cool News that Set Rogen is so gay!"

What was revealed was that Sony Pictures was completely in panic mode over the less than stellar performance of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and were now discussing bringing back Sam Raimi to save the franchise with a new trilogy. It was also revealed that the studio heads had been in talks with Marvel/Disney (who had purchased Marvel Comics) to bring Spider-Man into the highly coveted MCU family of films. But, negotiations were stopped by Sony Pictures heads that did not want cede any creative control to Marvel.


When the heads of the Sony Corporation in Japan got word of this, they were plenty pissed. Why would a studio haemorrhaging money not want to partner up with the undisputed kinds of making superhero movies?  The email leaks were in December 2014 and the announcement that Sony and Marvel/Disney were now going to partner up to make Spider-Man's cinematic outings came in early February 2015, shortly after some serious shake ups at Sony Pictures. Seems like somebody came from Japan and made heads role in Hollywood.


The plan is now for Spider-Man to appear in Marvel/Disney produced films set in the MCU and for Sony to make Spider-Man solo films set in the MCU. It also means that all of the continuity that Sony was building up for its proposed Spider-Man Cinematic Universe will be scrapped, with the strange caveat that The Sinister Six movie is still in the pipeline, only to be delayed.


So, we are going to get new directors and new actors but Spider-Man will still be Spider-Man. It's a heck of a long way to go to get form one universe to the other, but at least he made it all in one piece. We hope.