As of late last December, Sony Pictures' franchise film The Amazing Spider-Man 2 was the lowest-grossing Marvel comic book adaptation at the U.S. box-office, in a year when there were a total of FIVE movies based on Marvel Comics properties, namely: Captain America: The Winter Soldier, X-Men: Days of Future Past, Guardians of the Galaxy, Big Hero 6, and TASM 2. Last night, TASM 2 was the only film among those five not to receive a single Oscar nomination, with the others collecting at least one each, and Guardians of the Galaxy managing to pick up two.
Considering the commercial and critical highs which Sony's Spider-Man franchise once enjoyed, this has got to hurt. Once upon a time, Spider-Man was a certified box-office titan; the very first Spider-Man movie was the very first movie to ever gross over $100 million in a single weekend, a feat that not even Harry Potter or any of the Star Wars prequels, then the box-office gold standard, could manage. Spider-Man 2 remains the only film based on a Marvel comic ever to win an Academy Award (visual effects, 2004). Two of the first three Spider-Man movies were the highest grossing films at the global box-office in their respective years of release. Basically, while films like X-Men and Blade established Marvel-based movies as credible box-office players, the towering performances of the Spider-Man movies was what established that putting the "Marvel" logo before a movie was a virtual guarantee of its success.
All of that seems a distant memory now. Even though 2012's The Amazing Spider-Man pulled in surprisingly respectable grosses worldwide for a supposedly unwanted reboot, TASM 2 left no doubt that the once-widely loved series of films has lost a good chunk of its audience.
In the midst of all of this, the recent revelation that Sony has actually been in talks with Marvel for the crossover to happen is at once the most exciting and frustrating bit of movie-related information I have heard in a long time. It's exciting, because I can't honestly think of any other way to describe the thought of Spider-Man becoming part of a shared cinematic universe. It's frustrating, because nothing has come of these talks, except for Sony's clearly hollow boasts that it doesn't need Marvel Studios to keep the character interesting.
The thing is, fanboy hyperbole aside, this is a crossover that has to happen. One needs only look at the success of The Avengers and even non-Marvel projects like The Walking Dead to know that these characters are so much stronger together than they are apart. The goodwill from The Avengers has been nothing short of astonishing; all of the solo "Avenger" movies that came after the 2012 box-office phenomenon saw significant bumps in their international box-office, and all of them, it's worth pointing out, grossed more than the last Spider-Man movie, at least in terms of U.S. box-office. The X-Men franchise got a real shot in the arm this year (and even ended up outgrossing Spidey, once the more favored of the two properties), because of the novel premise of merging the old and new casts. Ensemble is the way to go; even Superman and Batman are learning this particular lesson.
Spider-man is the only major superhero property these days that doesn't involve any kind of team or team-up potential, and it's worth noting that all of the Marvel properties that beat him at the U.S. box office this year either involved teams, or characters who were part of prominent teams. Heck, the Captain America sequel featured one of his Avengers teammates in a pretty pivotal role.
As the saying goes: if you can't beat them, join them.
I think I speak for millions of Spider-Man fans, when I say with all affection and respect to Sony, who are responsible for bringing my favorite character in all of fiction to the big screen:
You can't beat them.
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