Why Spider-Man and Wolverine Won't Be In The Avengers

Okay, I've about heard enough. I'm certainly no expert on the matter, but I know enough to feel like my brain is being assaulted whenever I hear this matter being discussed. There is a startling amount of people out there without even the most rudimentary knowledge of the way movie and character rights are handled, so it's time to educate some masses.

Just to get it out of the way, Spider-Man and Wolverine will not possibly appear in the announced Avengers film that should be coming out in the next few years. This is not speculation or rumor, just cold hard fact. You see Marvel Studios, the studio who made Iron Man and rebooted The Incredible Hulk, will be putting out the Avengers movie, and they don't own the rights to Spider-Man or Wolverine (among many others).

"But Marvel owns them, so Marvel Studios can use them too." No they can't, that's not how these things work. This article explains this better, but I'll quote some of the relevant parts here.

When Marvel went bankrupt in 1996, it climbed out of the abyss by selling off the film rights to several of its characters. The rights to X-Men, Fantastic Four and Daredevil went to 20th Century Fox; Sony's Columbia Pictures snapped up Spider-Man and Ghost Rider; and Universal bought the screen rights for Hulk and Namor the Submariner.

Although all these are Marvel comicbook characters, the fact that different studios own the movie rights makes crossovers less likely.

The problem is, it us up to Sony and Fox's discretion to even allow a cameo, and why would they give a hand to some of their biggest competition? At the end of the day all of these decisions are business ones. No matter how much the fans would dig it, Sony and Fox haven't been co-operative in the past so they're unlikely to change now. Sorry to bust the bubble folks, it appears that Spidey will be a lone wolf for quite some time.