And it was all chugging along so nicely. Just when Sony and Disney were celebrating the billion-dollar-plus success of their latest joint endeavor, Spider-Man: Far From Home, along comes some financial rain to wash it all out. Okay, so perhaps it's not quite so drastic, but Disney and Sony have failed to come to financial terms on future outings of the web-slinger, which will have ramifications for future films.
Primarily, it means that Marvel boss Kevin Feige will no longer have any producing impact on the Spider-Man movies produced by Sony, and it also probably means that Peter Parker (Tom Holland) will disappear from the MCU.
The problem breaks down thus: Sony and Disney had a finance, profit participation and producing deal to share Spidey, which meant Disney/Marvel helped make and promote the Sony Spider-films, but only received a certain share of the film's direct profits (though the Mouse House retained the merchandising rights). Disney asked for a bigger share going forward and Sony's team, confident they can keep going with their own Spider-universe (including Venom, Morbius and the other spin-offs they have in the works alongside future Holland films, decided to reject the proposal).
Given the huge success of the last two Spidey movies in particular, this feels like a mistake on both sides, but then, the MCU is a behemoth that has functioned without Spider-Man and Sony has proved it can make good movies without the Marvel team with Into The Spider-Verse.
For the sheer sake of seeing Peter interact with future MCU types, we hope it gets resolved (and someone letting it slip to Deadline sounds like trying to force the companies back to the table), but for now, this is where they stand.