Marvel to lose Spider-Man rights if Far from Home fails to gross ‘a billion dollars’

Reported contract clause could have led to a “quickie” Spider-Man/Venom crossover

Spider-Man: Far from Home has proven a runaway success this summer, grossing over $600 million worldwide. But according to a new industry report, Marvel Studios may lose the rights to the superhero if the film somehow struggles to gross $400 million more.

In a recent edition of the industry newsletter The Ankler, entertainment journalist Richard Rushfield has claimed that the deal struck by Sony and Marvel Studios in 2015, allowing both studios to share the Spider-Man character and enable him to appear in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, came with an unusual clause.

“The original Sony/Marvel/Spidey deal to co-produce these movies stipulated that if this Spidey [Far from Home] cleared a billion, Marvel would get to oversee a third. If it hadn’t, full control would have reverted back to Sony,” he writes.

Rushfield also claimed that Sony would have likely attempted to launch a crossover film featuring Spider-Man and Tom Hardy’s Venom, in what he called “a quickie mash-up that very potentially could’ve sunk both [properties]”.

The stipulation was likely written to enable Marvel to cleanly wash their hands of the property if the Tom Holland Spider-Man movies were poorly received by audiences, in a similar fashion to the regretful Fantastic Four reboot or even the Andrew Garfield run of Spidey films.

Luckily for Marvel, Far from Home looks set to be a major financial triumph for the studio, with the film already ranking as the sixth most successful movie of the year despite being in cinemas for just over a week.