The Spider-Man Problem (update)
Planet Money
NPR
4.6 • 29.8K Ratings
🗓️ 7 June 2023
⏱️ 31 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This past weekend, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse had the second largest domestic opening of 2023, netting (or should we say webbing?) over $120 million in its opening weekend in the U.S. and Canada. But the story leading up to this latest Spider-Man movie has been its own epic saga.
When Marvel licensed the Spider-Man film rights to Sony Pictures in the 1990s, the deal made sense — Marvel didn't make movies yet, and their business was mainly about making comic books and toys. Years later, though, the deal would come back to haunt Marvel, and it would start a long tug of war between Sony and Marvel over who should have creative cinematic control of Marvel's most popular superhero. Today, we break down all of the off-screen drama that has become just as entertaining as the movies themselves.
This episode was originally produced by Nick Fountain with help from Taylor Washington and Dave Blanchard. It was engineered by Isaac Rodrigues. It was edited by Jess Jiang. The update was produced by Emma Peaslee, with engineering by Maggie Luthar. It was edited by Keith Romer.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is Planet Money from NPR. |
| 0:06.3 | The biggest superhero blockbuster of 2023 is not Marvel's newest Ant-Man movie. |
| 0:14.3 | It is also not Marvel's newest Guardians of the Galaxy movie. |
| 0:17.7 | No, no, it is the newest Spider-Man movie. |
| 0:22.4 | You can never be part of this. |
| 0:28.1 | Spider-Man across the Spider-Verse made $120 million last weekend in the US, making it |
| 0:34.9 | the biggest comic book movie opening of the year, but notably a comic book movie that |
| 0:41.2 | was not made by Marvel Studios, the biggest, most successful superhero movie company in history. |
| 0:48.0 | Nope, because Marvel does not own the film rights to its own most popular character. |
| 0:53.1 | Sony Pictures owns the Spider-Writes. |
| 0:55.4 | And a while ago, we dedicated an entire episode to the surprisingly epic saga of Sony and Marvel |
| 1:01.8 | and the Spider-Man film rights. |
| 1:03.6 | Today, we're going to rerun that episode because this new movie success kind of redefines |
| 1:08.5 | what our original story meant. |
| 1:10.6 | Yeah, so this new across the Spider-Verse movie, it is an animated film. |
| 1:15.1 | It's the sequel to that Miles Morales into the Spider-Verse movie. |
| 1:19.0 | But before these Spider-Verse movies, like all of the big, expensive Spider-Man blockbusters |
| 1:24.4 | were live-action movies where an actual human actor had to put on an actual Spider-Man costume |
| 1:31.4 | or whatever. |
| 1:32.4 | Yeah, and that is why in our Planet Money episode, we are only talking about the live-action |
| 1:36.8 | movies. |
| 1:37.8 | But at the very end, we're going to come back and explain how these new animated movies |
... |
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