Sony has revealed its name for its Spider-Man Marvel Cinematic Universe – and no, it’s not anything ‘web’ related.
Instead the studio has internally given the franchise the even more predictable name of ‘Sony’s Universe of Marvel Characters’ or ‘SUMC’ for short.
The name was revealed by president of Columbia Pictures, Sanford Panitch, who’s been overseeing Sony’s Marvel projects, in an interview with Variety in which he discussed the future plans for the franchise.
Sony has a number of projects in development based on Spider-Man comic book characters, and the SUMC will kick off in October with the highly-anticipated Venom, starring Tom Hardy.
Other projects have already seen Sony confirm plans for a film centred around vampire-villain Morbius with Jared Leto in the lead role, while a a Kraven the Hunter film is in the works too.
Scripts are also in development for movies based on the Silk, Jackpot, and Nightwatch characters, which suggests that the studio are committed to portraying a more diverse range of characters. For instance Silk is Korean-American, while Jackpot is an older female heroine.
“Spider-Man connects to a lot of the characters,” Panitch said. “There are villains, heroes, and antiheroes, and a lot are female characters, many of whom are bona fide, fully dimensionalised, and utterly unique.”
“We feel there’s no reason the Marvel characters shouldn’t be able to embrace diversity.”
There’s also been a bit of a shake-up to past ideas now that this ‘SUMC’ is getting underway, as the planned Silver and Black film, which was set to focus on female characters Silver Sable and Black Cat, has been dropped in favour of two separate standalones.
“We believe Black Cat is enough of her own character with a great backstory and a canon of material to draw from to justify her own film,” Panitch said.
And, above all things, he added Sony was “focused on being faithful to the comics”. Phew. That’s good to know.
Venom will be released on October 5.
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