Yesterday a lot of people logged on to Disney+ for the first time to find (when the site was working) a film and television library so deep and vast that it’s a little daunting. However, one thing they didn’t find was either of the Tom Holland-starring Spider-Man MCU movies, and they won’t for the foreseeable future.
According to a report from The Verge, neither of the Marvel/Sony Spider-Man movies — Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far From Home — will be coming to Disney+, leaving a noticeable hole in the streamer’s collection of MCU movies. While there are still multiple MCU movies (Black Panther, Ant-Man and the Wasp, Avengers: Infinity War, and Thor: Ragnarok) not on the streaming service as Disney waits for Netflix’s streaming rights to expire at the end of 2019, the Spider-Man movies are a different beast. The film rights are solely owned by Sony, despite still sharing production and profits on the films. That means it’s a far more difficult task to get the movies on Disney+, where all of the content so far is solely owned by Disney in one way or another. This is also the reason that The Incredible Hulk isn’t on the platform either as Universal owns the rights to that film.
“We love our friends at Sony, but we don’t have any plans to have the live-action Spider-Man movies on Disney+,” Ricky Strauss, Disney’s head of content and marketing for Disney+, said. “We will have all the Spider-Man animated shows that we did so they’ll be on there under the Marvel banner. But who knows what can happen in the future?”
Eventually, every Disney IP that Disney has the rights to is going to end up on Disney+ according to executives. That’s just a matter of time or negotiations, as the surprise announcement of multiple MCU movies thought to be tied up with streaming contracts coming to the service showed. It seems, however, that if Disney doesn’t own the IP, they aren’t too concerned with fighting over the streaming rights or paying for them… yet.
