Short of Norman Osborn, no single man that has ever walked the fictional or non-fictional planet Earth has a greater vendetta against Spider-Man than Avi Arad. Unlike Norman, however, Arad seems relatively unaware of his ongoing destruction of all things Peter Parker. After producing Marvel Comic-based such as 1998’s Blade, 2000’s X-Men and 2002’s Spider-Man, Arad went on to produce some of the worst CBMs in the history of the genre and famously forcing Sam Raimi into including Venom into Spider-Man 3, tainting the franchise.
As penance for his sins, Arad went on to ensure that Sony could produce a number of outrageously terrible films built around Spider-Man villains including Venom, Venom: Let There Be Carnage, Morbius and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter along with another half dozen films that certainly aren’t making the top 25 CBMs. Now Sony leans heavily into both animation and their relationship with Marvel Studios to resuscitate the studio’s reputation with the Web-Head, Arad reveals that, once again, he is clueless about another Sony project.
In an interview with Variety, Arad claimed that a Spider-Woman movie–based on another character whose live-action right are shared by Marvel Studios and Sony–would be coming “sooner than you expect.” Wildly enough, since casting for Spider-Woman, which Sony exec Amy Pascal says “is happening“, was underway in prior to COVID shutting down Hollywood in 2020, fans have been expecting the film, once believed to be helmed by Olivia Wilde, to have been in theaters already. However, fans are set to be treated to Sony/Marvel fare such as Madame Web and, maybe, El Muerto instead while the theatrical future of Spider-Woman, a far more premiere Marvel Comics character, remains uncertain.
Whether or not Wilde is still attached to the Spider-Woman project–which was slated to feature Jessica Drew–is unknown. However, given that Marvel Studios and Sony have a very strange and unfortunate relationship over the character’s live-action right, anything less than a Disney/Sony co-op will not do the character justice.
Source: Variety
