Sony is essentially internally auditioning its more than 900 Spider-Man-adjacent characters, to which it has attached the moniker Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters.
According to Hopkins, the team is “pretty far down the road in terms of working through which characters we think could be their own star of a series.”
Disney has long been drawing from the Marvel well. With its absorption of 21st Century Fox, the Burbank-based giant will soon have “Fantastic Four” and “X-Men,” leaving Sony as the only studio rival with licensing rights to Marvel characters.
“We’re developing a lot of Marvel-related content, and I think we’ll be out in the market very soon with something really, really big and transformational for us, because we’ve not done any shows with Marvel before, with Marvel IP,” says Hopkins. “So that’s a big piece of development that we’re onto.”
There’s plenty of precedent for serializing small-screen comic-book dramas, even without any superhero headliners. Think “Gotham” without Batman, “The Gifted” sans Wolverine, or all the Avenger-less Marvel series that Disney has developed, such as “Agents of SHIELD” and “Jessica Jones.” Plus, the box office success of “Venom” and the recent Oscar-winning glow of “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” have bolstered confidence that there’s an appetite for Sony’s slice of Marvel-town.