Spider-Man joining the Marvel Cinematic Universe opens up a massive slew of possibilities. There's plenty of other Marvel properties that, technically speaking, aren't controlled by Marvel Studios. The X-Men. The Fantastic Four. Even Deadpool, who's sort of an X-Men member, but mostly goes off and does his own thing. Now that Spider-Man's joined the top dog, it's possible any of those might too.
That idea's setting the Internet on fire right now. ScreenRant thinks that the combination of Sony and Marvel teaming up for "Spider-Man" will make the film a more massive box-office hit than either studio could have pulled off alone. The combination of the two studios makes the film feel like a bigger crossover, and thus a bigger deal- inviting more to come and buy a ticket.
And can you imagine how big it'd be if the X-Men, Avengers, Fantastic Four and Spider-Man all showed up in the same film? That could easily become the #1 film of all time... so long as it was good enough to bring people to the theater more than once.
But at the same time, Newsarama advises against merging all our comic book properties into one giant mishmash. They make a few pretty salient points- that writing them all in together would be a Herculean fight of writing, and that the universes don't actually meld together at all. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is bright, colorful and fun; the X-Men universe goes for something slightly more serious, and the new "Fantastic Four" reboot looks like it'll be "The Dark Knight" with superpowers. Tonally, those three wouldn't work together at all.
But Hugh Jackman's excited about the possibility of more crossovers. And Hugh Jackman was the one who's been trying to get Wolverine into every comic book movie ever made, Marvel or not. At the very least, we might be on the crest of a huge wave of Wolverine cameos.
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