Spider-Man has appeared in film since his first adaptation in 1977, a television film broadcast on CBS. The film rights to Spider-Man belonged to Marvel Entertainment until 1999, when Sony Pictures bought them for $7 million.[1] He has been Marvel's most successful character in the American film industry ever since.
After selling the Spider-Man motion picture rights to Sony, Marvel eventually founded its own film studio, developing the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) based on the characters they still held the rights to. Spider-Man belonged exclusively to Sony until a deal in 2016, when Sony and the Walt Disney Company[2] entered an agreement to introduce Spider-Man to the MCU. Despite some disagreements pertaining to finances and merchandising between the two parties, the agreement proved to be a successful endeavor for both companies. The following two Avengers sequels included Spider-Man, and crossed the two-billion-dollar mark at the worldwide box office. Meanwhile, Sony, in association with Marvel,[3] launched Sony's Spider-Man Universe (SSU), with Sony entering a three-billion-dollar streaming agreement with Netflix and Disney.[4]