Disney-Sony Spiderman Publicity Stunt

CONTENT WARNINGS: spoilers for Avengers: Endgame, & Spider-Man: Far From Home

When it was released this past April, Avengers: Endgame brought in $2.7 billion, breaking box office records and surpassing Avatar as the highest grossing movie of all time. After the movie's epic run, it seemed that the Marvel Cinematic Universe was set to die down. After all, the writers had killed off two of the original Avengers, both of whom were leading characters: Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr.) and Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson). 

However, Disney managed to end Marvel’s summer on a high note with the release of Spider-Man: Far From Home in late June, which pulled in over a billion dollars in box offices. The film seemed to suggest that Tom Holland’s Spider-Man might be on the path to becoming the next Iron Man and taking a leadership role among the Avengers, which would effectively open up a path for Disney to bring the Avengers franchise back to life.

So fans like myself were shocked to hear that Disney and Sony had split in August, and as a result, Spider-Man would be pulled from the MCU.

Fans responded with tweets demanding that Sony and Disney come to a deal and Spider-Man be returned to the MCU. As a joke, I began to tell people that it was all an enormous publicity stunt, and Spider-Man would be returned to the MCU shortly. I mean, how could the franchise possibly continue without him?

After a month of silence, Disney and Sony released another statement on September 27th announcing that they had, in fact, come to a deal, and Spider-Man would remain in the MCU for one more movie in order to complete the trilogy.

Fans were ecstatic; Tom Holland even tweeted a clip of Leonardo di Caprio’s speech from The Wolf on Wall Street in which the actor shouts, “I’M NOT F***ING LEAVING,” in response to the deal.

Although most fans were thrilled to hear the news, I think that the whole withdrawal-of-the-withdrawal was a bit strange. Disney and Sony came to the deal shortly after making an enormous fuss about pulling Spider-Man out of the MCU, and then announced he would be doing one more movie with Marvel…which was their original plan, before the Disney-Sony split. So, did their plan really change at all? Or was it all just a publicity stunt? The latter seems the most likely answer.

Looking back on the odd Sony-Disney interactions over the course of a month, the whole event was likely a stunt created to pull in more money for Marvel films and make the upcoming Spiderman 3 a bigger hit in box offices. Not only does the stunt follow Disney’s pattern of increasing greed, but it also shows desperation on Disney’s part. There are four Marvel movies in the top-ten highest grossing films of all time, and all four of them are Avengers films. With two original members of the Avengers team dead and Captain America retired, it would seem that Marvel had lost its source of box office leverage.

So, if Spider-Man’s canceled withdrawal from the MCU was a publicity stunt, then it could be seen as a last act of desperation to draw fans’ attention to the Spider-Man conflict and pique their interest in future movies. Judging by the considerable news coverage the event received, the stunt succeeded. Thanks to Disney’s cunning, we can be sure that Spider-Man 3 will win over audiences in 2021 as well.

by HALEY CREIGHTON