For comic fans such as myself, the modern film industry has been tremendously valuable asset in taking classic superhero stories and delivering them into modern day blockbusters on the big screen. But what many people don’t realize is that  when it comes to making Marvel movies, there are 3 primary production companies involved:

20th Century Fox – owns the rights to  all the X-Men movies, and is going to premiere the Fantastic 4 reboot later this year.

Sony – owns the rights to the Spider-Man series and the Amazing Spider-Man movies

Marvel Studios – this is essentially Disney, who oversees all the Avengers characters movies and the Guardians of the Galaxy franchise (you are probably going to see that these two groups are going to become a lot more intertwined in the coming films into an even bigger Marvel Cinematic Universe)

Now you may be wondering why Marvel has given their different characters to all these different companies for distribution, and the answer is really quite simple. Prior to being bought by Disney in 2008/2009, Marvel was exclusively a comic book publishing group but not a movie group, so when they decided to start turning their stories into movies, they sold them to groups such as Fox and Sony. But once Disney acquired them during their conquest of everything, they were then able to put all their movie production resources into creating new Marvel films – this is when we see the first Iron Man movies, Thor movies, etc. However, each company had a completely separate universe for their characters, independent of the others – this is why there are no mutants fighting alongside SHIELD, and why Peter Parker goes to work at Oscorp instead of Stark Industries, even though in the comics it is simply one big universe that everyone lives together in.

Now, with that being said…

The week before Tet break it was announced that Sony and MCU had worked out a deal whereby Marvel had essentially bought back the rights to the Spider-Man movie franchise. Why is this cool? Because this means it is extremely likely that Peter Parker will end up joining the Avengers in future installments, and is even slated for an appearance in Captain America: Civil War in 2016. Why is this also kind of a bummer? They will be getting rid of Andrew Garfield, the dude who had been playing Parker in the most recent Amazing Spider-Man movies, who I really liked, as well as probably some of the other actors who had contracts with Sony for the future Amazing Spider-Man movies. There are even rumors going around of a possible Spider-Man appearance in the secret scene of the Age of Ultron movie…

For those who are interested, the upcoming schedule for movies with Marvel comic caharacters is as follows:

Avengers: Age of Ultron – May 1, 2015

Ant-Man – July 17, 2015

Fantastic 4 – August 7, 2015

Deadpool – February 12, 2016

Captain America: Civil War – May 6, 2016

X-Men: Apocalypse – May 27, 2016

Doctor Strange – November 4, 2016

Sinister Six – November 11, 2016

The Wolverine 3 – March 3, 2017

Guardians of the Galaxy 2 – May 5, 2017

Fantastic Four 2 – July 14, 2017

New Spider-Man installment – July 28, 2017

Thor: Ragnarok – November 3, 2017

Venom Carnage – TBA 2017

Avengers: Infinity War (Part I) – May 4, 2018

Black Panther – July 6, 2018

Unspecified X-Men movie – July 13, 2018

Captain Marvel – November 2, 2018

Avengers: Infinity War (Part II) – May 3, 2018

Inhumans – July 12, 2018