According to THR, Sony will be using the "creative control" they maintain to find a much younger actor than Andrew Garfield to play Spider-Man. That will be disappointing to his fans, of course, but it has to have been expected. He's seemed to have been checking out on the role, anyway, and this frees him up to take more interesting roles. There's a significant portion of the comic book fandom who really want to see a different approach taken with the character, like maybe going with the black Miles Morales from Ultimate Spider-Man rather than Peter Parker, who audiences have seen through two franchises now. It would be a ballsy move, one that Sony might not have been willing to take without Marvel Studios' muscle behind them. Plus it would help them reach a whole new audience that may have grown bored of Peter "great power, great responsibility" Parker.
Another who definitely won't be coming back is director Marc Webb, who was initially set to direct the entire Spidey trilogy before a fourth film was added some time ago. He's been lining up other projects in recent weeks as if preparing for this news. The question now is who will be at the helm of the new, untitled Spider-Man movie which arrives on July 28th 2017, after debuting in the MCU likely as part of Captain America: Civil War. Downgraded to exec-producer status, and essentially removed from any creative input whatsoever, are previous producers Avi Arad and Matt Talmach. Probably a good idea with Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios on hand now, to limit the number of cooks in the kitchen.
All around this was a win-win deal for both sides. The deal is said to largely be one where no money exchanged hands. Sony gets to basically lease the character out to Marvel (ironic considering Marvel leased the character to Sony to begin with) and reap the benefits of their tremendous popularity to relaunch a brand new franchise. Marvel, who retain the merchandising rights to the character, will probably make a fortune on toy and collectibles sales. Who needs a traditional deal when that's the case? Plus, there's already speculation that Marvel is using this as a foot in the door to acquiring Spider-Man completely...or perhaps even to buy Sony Pictures if they become available. There's no timetable for that and, frankly, I doubt Sony will ever completely sell it back to Marvel. We talk about the "failure" of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 that drove these deals to begin with, but the film made over $700M. Think about that for a second. How many $700M failures do you know? In short, Spider-Man is incredibly profitable.
But the main thing here is that Sony can use this to start over from scratch. Variety says the plan is to move forward with spinoffs for Venom, Sinister Six, and a movie led by female characters, even though The Amazing Spider-Man 3 has been cancelled. How they plan to integrate these spinoffs into the new Spidey reality is anybody's guess, and we probably won't know for a long time yet.
