Spider-Man star Tom Holland addresses split between Disney and Sony

Spider-Man star Tom Holland has addressed the uncertain future of his character amid the ongoing argument between rival studios Disney and Sony.

Spider-Man star Tom Holland has addressed the uncertain future of his character amid the ongoing argument between rival studios Disney and Sony.

Disney and its subsidiary Marvel Studios hold the rights to comic book characters featured in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) — think Iron Man, Thor and Captain America — but Sony owns the on-screen rights to Spider-Man.

As my colleague Wenlei Ma explained this week, four years ago Disney and Sony announced a deal in which Spider-Man would appear in the MCU, but Sony would still finance and distribute his stand-alone films.

There have been two of those stand-alone movies so far: Homecoming and Far From Home. Meanwhile, Spider-Man has also appeared in the broader MCU films Captain America: Civil War, Avengers: Infinity War and Avengers: Endgame.

But this week we learned Disney and Sony had failed to reach a deal to continue the arrangement going forward, meaning Spider-Man could disappear from the MCU and other MCU characters could vanish from his solo films, with Sony going it alone.

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Backstage at Disney’s D23 event in Anaheim, California today, Holland spoke to People and Entertainment Weekly about the situation.

“Basically, we’ve made five great movies,” he said.

“It’s been five amazing years. I’ve had the time of my life. Who knows what the future holds? But all I know is that I’m going to continue playing Spider-Man and having the time of my life. It’s going to be fun, however we choose to do it.

“The future for Spider-Man will be different, but it will be equally as awesome and amazing, and we’ll find new ways to make it even cooler.”

Holland didn’t explicitly mention Spider-Man on stage at D23, where he was promoting the upcoming Pixar movie Onward alongside Chris Pratt and Julia-Louis Dreyfus, but he did allude to it.

“Hey everyone, it’s been a crazy week, but I want you all to know from the bottom of my heart that I love you 3000,” he said.

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Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige also spoke to Entertainment Weekly, emphasising his “gratitude and joy”.

“We’ve got to make five films within the MCU with Spider-Man, two stand-alone films and three with the Avengers. It was a dream that I never thought would happen,” Feige said.

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“It was never meant to last forever. We knew there was a finite amount of time that we’d be able to do this, and we told the story we wanted to tell, and I’ll always be thankful for that.”

The schism between Disney and Sony came from the former’s desire to contribute 50 per cent of the financing for future Spider-Man films. In effect, that would likely mean taking half the movies’ profits as well.

We’re talking a lot of money here. Far From Home became Sony’s biggest grossing movie ever this week as it passed $US1.1 billion.