Hello True-be-leakers!

Welcome back to another Tales from the Mod Queue! We have some random tid bits to share today along with some history into the Marvel/Sony relationship and what is going on with Ghost Rider. The info in this post came directly to us from several unverified sources, some of which are trusted. Some of the information was provided prior to public details that are now known. While we trust the content of this post, it is advisable to take it with a grain of salt. Enjoy!

Trusted Sources

• Shang-Chi 2 is releasing February 14th, 2025
• Mahershala Ali was on set for WBN, but we are unaware if he is still in the special
• We are here to end the debate: Krasinski isn’t the MCU’s Reed
• Zemo has yet to be listed or mentioned anywhere with respect to Thunderbolts

Unverified Sources

Quantumania

• No major characters die at the end of the film, including Hank and Janet. Everyone survives.
• The film ends with Scott and Hope trapped in the Quantum Realm with no apparent method of escape. Hank, Janet and Cassie make it home but can’t re-enter the Quantum Realm to rescue them.

Marvel Miscellaneous

• Marvel met with Ryan Gosling as well as Austin Butler earlier this year. Marvel specifically discussed Iron Fist with Gosling. He wants to star in a martial arts project and we are unsure if there's a new Iron Fist project in development, if marvel wants him to take over the title role, or if he is playing a one-off villain, etc.
• Marvel has also met with Mason Mecartea. The meeting was unrelated to his role in Ms. Marvel.
• Pearl Thusi is in the process of finalizing a role in Blade , possibly as a love interest
• Many people have indicated that WBN cut 20 minutes, one source says that even though this happened they reshot some material and it is back to 50/60 minutes.

The Marvel/Sony Relationship

It’s story time. We have some info as to why the Marvel/Sony deals have been so difficult. To say that Marvel and Sony wanted different things out of the deal is nothing new, but the majority of the back and forth after Far From Home actually didn't center around Spidey himself, but the many secondary characters that Sony also holds the movie rights to.

Both parties realized that it would be mutually beneficial to continue doing the main Spidey series together, if nothing else the Marvel aura itself is worth keeping up the deal on Sony's end and the merchandising profits that come with the movies make it worth keeping up on Marvel's end. So even if neither of the parties get exactly the terms they were hoping for, they know that this is still a very lucrative deal that is an absolute win for them

There were some characters they were concerned about Sony using much more so than others, and there were three that they really wanted Sony to stay away from: Kraven, Black Cat, and most of all Spider-Woman aka Jessica Drew. Ryan Coogler had really wanted to use Kraven in the first Black Panther film, and Marvel even tried to work out a tit-for-tat with them in order to use the character. Marvel fought hard to get Coogler access to the character for the sequel, they also fought hard to quietly kill Sony's Black Cat-Silver Sable project. More than anything though, they wanted to be able to introduce Jessica Drew in their 616 universe and use her in their new lineup of Avengers.

At the time of the discussions, Sony held the rights to Jessica Drew while Marvel held the rights to Julia Carpenter, a different version of the Spider-Woman character who later takes on the mantle of Madame Web. Marvel tried very hard to convince Sony to swap the rights on those two characters. We believe they were successful as when the Madame Web movie was announced it seemed like it was replacing the previously announced Spider-Woman one. However, at this point, we are unsure. But we do know that one of Marvel's highest priorities in their negotiations with Sony, aside from making sure that they were happy with how the character of Spider-Man would be handled, was to make sure that they had similar control over Jessica Drew. Considering those negotiations were almost 3 years ago now, we would imagine that we could probably hear about Jessica Drew's inclusion in a project sooner rather than later.

Ghost Rider Info

Lets talk about the cancellation of the Hulu Ghost Rider series. When the first Black Panther movie released, its financial success surpassed everybody's wildest expectations. Marvel Studios is sincere about their commitment to reflecting diversity in their films, however, they're also a business and they saw that their gambit in producing a movie centered around a diverse hero had paid off. DC took notice of this, and wasted no time in announcing a Blue Beetle film later in 2018, which they hoped could essentially serve as the Latin equivalent of Black Panther. A week later Marvel quickly announced Shang-Chi for much of the same reasons. Fast forward to 2019 and Marvel had announced a Ghost Rider series. However, as the year progressed, it became increasingly apparent that DC was not going to be able to meet the ambitious film schedule that they had announced. Marvel did what digging it could and made the decision to cancel the Hulu series in hopes of releasing a Ghost Rider film to theaters before Blue Beetle. We are unsure why the film has been delayed further but our source’s best guess would be that Marvel still has plans to use Roberto Reyes as their quote-unquote flagship Latin hero.

That's all this time folks. As always, if you have a new scoop you would like to share feel free to reach out to us via Modmail to be added to the next TFTMQ.