If you haven’t heard, Sony Pictures was hacked earlier this week. Vox reports that there’s some possibility that the hackers are working with the North Korean government, which is furious with Sony for its upcoming film The Interview, a movie in which characters played by Seth Rogen and James Franco plan to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The hackers claim to have over 100TB of data from Sony’s private servers, and they’ve been sending some of it to big websites. Gawker received a file named “Sony_2012_Comments”, where the company talks about how important Spider-Man is for their business:
Why are some studios making Hunger Games, Harry Potter, Twilight – and we are considering movies like Moneyball, Steve Jobs story, Captain Phillips Story, Evel Knievel story, etc. Are you aware that SPE only has 1 franchise – Spiderman. Yet, it took 5 years to generate a sequel? Spidey 3 was released in summer 2007, #4 in 2012. Don’t harry potters come out over 2-3 years? Are you aware that SPE has only 1 franchise – Spidey? Yet we waited 5 years after Spidey 3 (2007) to release #4? Have you read the SEC annual report? Disney will make $300M on Spidey merchandise this year alone. We won’t!
While the direction Sony wants to take Spider-Man next is a bit unclear with The Amazing Spider-Man 3 being delayed until 2018 and the lack of news about The Sinister Six, which is due out in 2016… one thing is for sure! Sony considers their Spider-Man franchise to be very important to their business, and likely won’t be selling the rights back to Marvel any time soon.
