Spider-Man joined the MCU back with 2016’s Captain America: Civil War, and since then everyone’s been happy. Well, almost. He’s only there out of some complicated deal between Sony, who owns his wing of the Marvel-verse (including Venom), and Disney, who own all the rest. There was that time Disney almost lost Spidey, but that all worked out in the end. The merger, though, didn’t start so swimmingly either.
After Spider-Man: No Way Home’s freakishly strong weekend at the box office, The New York Times published a chat with Sony producer Amy Pascal and MCU honcho Kevin Feige. The two revealed, among other things, that they initially warned stars Tom Holland and Zendaya that they can’t date. (They did anyway.) But they also discussed the time Feige first floated the idea that Peter Parker should come hang out with the Avengers.
It was Pascal who reached out to Feige, after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed (which is to say it still grossed over $700 million worldwide). Her request was simple: She said, “Help.” Specifically she wanted him to help her beef up some ideas they had for the character’s future. Feige said he told her, “I’m not good at that — giving advice and leaving. The only way I know how to help is if we just make the movie for you.”
“And then I threw a sandwich at him,” Pascal said.
It was, Feige said, a “pretty low-key sandwich.” But it was clear to him that “she did not like that suggestion.”
But Feige was not discouraged by being pelted with food, as Pascal recalls:
And then Kevin called me and came over to the house and said, “I have an idea. What if Tony Stark makes Peter’s suit?” And as soon as he said that, I understood the possibilities of what we could do together. To have Iron Man and Spidey in the same world, one rooted more in technological innovation — the new suit — and less in medical experimentation, which is where we were confined before, felt so much more modern.
Cut to 2021 and it looks like Spidey ain’t leaving the MCU any time soon.. Enrage Amy Pascal by suggesting an idea she’ll eventually come around on — and which will earn you a ton of good will and, of course, money — and she might hit you with a BLT or, who knows, maybe something else like a Scotch woodcock.
(Via NYT)
