Lee stood for Sony in their decision not to accept a new Disney-proposed co-financing deal.
“When my father died, no one from Marvel or Disney reached out to me,” Lee said. “From day one, they have commoditized my father’s work and never shown him or his legacy any respect or decency. In the end, no one could have treated my father worse than Marvel and Disney’s executives.”
Lee added that her father’s legacy and his characters “deserve multiple points of view.”
Disney, which owns Marvel, and Sony made an unprecedented deal in 2015 that would bring Spider-Man into the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Sony would allow Marvel’s creative team to integrate Spider-Man into its cinematic universe and would put up 100% of the production costs. In exchange, Disney received 5% of “first-dollar gross,” or 5% of the ticket sales from the first day of the release, and retained the merchandising rights for the character. Sony would reap the rest of the box-office haul.
Disney reportedly proposed a 50/50 co-financing deal, meaning each company would put up half of the production costs and then split the profits, according to entertainment news website Deadline. Sony reportedly refused, and after this refusal Disney pulled out Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios as producers of Sony's future Spider-Man films, closing off the future for Spider-Man’s character within the MCU if the talks do not continue.
