In Hollywood, each start of the year is marked by the start of the Oscars season. Whatever the American film industry has to producers, publicists, or agents is lining up to have their foals nominated and win a statuette during the ceremony, which will be held this year on March 27. Posters are plastered all over Los Angeles, events to promote the films are organized, and rumors circulate, each seeking to undermine its competitors.
A first stage will open on January 27, with the start of the votes to nominate the nominees. According to a survey published at the end of December by The Hollywood Reporter, Sony would launch a massive campaign to Spider-Man: No Way Home (currently in theaters in France), by Jon Watts, is one of ten feature films in the running for the best film award.
Nowadays, Black panther (2018), by Ryan Coogler, is the only superhero film to ever win a nomination for the most prestigious of statuettes. But this season is not like the others: The Hollywood Reporter believes that Sony’s lobbying will benefit this time from the extreme benevolence of Disney, yet its rival. Never seen.
Hegemonic Marvel
It must be said that the equation is very complex. Spider-Man is a hero invented by screenwriter Stan Lee in 1962 for the publishing house of comics Marvel, bought in 2009 by the giant Disney. But, since 1998, Sony has owned the rights to adapt the spider-man stories to cinema. Likewise, the Hulk belongs to Universal and the X-Men to Fox.
A victorious campaign of Spider-Man: No Way Home would of course benefit Sony, but also Disney which, in addition to merchandising, would see its catalog as all superhero films enhanced with a welcome prestige, inscribing the genre, often disparaged from an artistic point of view, in a Hollywood story spanning almost a century. This is the last piece missing from the Marvel universe. Because on all other levels, this one is hegemonic.
Spider-Man: No Way Home has just crossed, during the first weekend of the year 2022, the bar of 610 million dollars of receipts in the United States. This total allows him, while waiting for better, to be the tenth largest income in history, knowing that he has also just garnered 1.4 billion dollars in the world. This figure is all the more impressive given that the film has not yet been released in China and that it takes place in the context of a year 2021 once again marked by the pandemic.
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