Podcast Reaction: The Miles Morales Edition

This week on the podcast, it was an all Spider-Man: Homecoming episode, which makes sense since the movie came out last week.  If they’d done it earlier, it would have been mostly speculation, and who wants to hear that stuff?

But then some stuff came up that caught my eye.  Ear?  Attention?  Yeah, let’s say attention since I didn’t see a dang thing.

So, two things were said that made me go, “Huh?” or “Say what?!?”

I’ll get the quicker one out of the way first.  Namely, when Ryan said Homecoming had too many 80s references.

Now, maybe it was because I wasn’t paying as much attention to such things as he was, but I didn’t see too much of that.  What struck me as odd was not that Ryan said something about too many 80s references as the fact Ryan said it, considering what his favorite book is.

So, yeah, Ryan was using say, my critiques on nostalgia or something.

But then came Jenny suggesting that Sony does not have the movie rights to Miles Morales.

Now, I don’t have any greater insight into what Sony does and doesn’t have the rights to than anyone else that doesn’t work for Sony or Marvel, but I strongly suspect that Sony does have partial rights to Miles the same way they do to Peter.  And no, I don’t say that because Fox somehow got the rights to all mutant stuff with the X-Men, which may be why the TV version of the New Warriors features neither Justice/Marvel Boy nor Firestar, the two mutants from that team.  The Fantastic Four rights, also held by Fox, likewise meant the MCU can’t use Skrulls, forcing a change to the conflict with the Kree for the original Guardians of the Galaxy movie.  So, yes, it would make sense that Sony got all Spider-Man related characters when they signed that deal, including some that hadn’t been created yet.  That seems to be the deal Fox got, so it would make sense.

But the way I see it, there’s a much easier way to see how Sony probably has some rights to Miles Morales:  Marvel didn’t just shrug and decide to do a Miles Morales movie instead of trying to get Peter Parker back.

Yes, Peter has much better name recognition, but it does seem as if if the MCU had complete rights to Miles, using him instead would have avoided a lot of problems for Marvel and their need to negotiate with Sony to get their flagship character back.

Granted, even if Marvel had the film rights to Miles, it may not have mattered because Sony would still have had the rights to the name “Spider-Man”.

But what do I know?  I’m not an intellectual property law specialist.