Semantic Nonsense: No way (at) home
It’s been getting harder and harder to avoid spoilers for Spider-Man: No Way Home. Downright impossible, even just browsing headlines about upcoming MCU projects.
I didn’t watch it because I was as certain to catch Omegamon Omicron in sold-out show after sold-out show as I would be eaten by a Grue for wandering into the darkness. The local AMC would be more than happy to rent me a private theater for $329. While that is significantly cheaper than a house, buying a house has very much precluded such an expenditure anyway.
So I busied myself finding it for streaming, or at least, finding out when streaming was going to hit. The past couple of MCU movies came to Disney+ at predictable, preannounced intervals after their theatrical releases. But Spider-Man is different. While I’m sure you assumed the Nick Hammond, Toby Maguire and Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies weren’t on Disney+, you might be surprised to know that neither are Tom Holland’s.
(Disney+ also, mysteriously, has every animated Spider-Man cartoon, but not any of the live action shows.)
As to why the MCU Spider-Man movies aren’t on Disney+, well, that means we’re talking about Sony. Again. As famous part-owners (and the bigger half of it, to boot) of Spider-Man’s movie rights, Sony also controls the streaming rights to the movies. (Don’t worry about Disney, they get the merchandising — Where the real money from the movie is made).
As we were just reading last week, Sony has a streaming agreement with Netflix. Which apparently isn’t worth the paper it was written on, because none of the Spider-Man movies are THERE either! Turns out, their agreement is for movies released between 2022 and 2026 (inclusive), with not a peep about the back catalog.
No Spider-Man movie is available at all to stream at all, outside of pay-per-view rentals or digital purchases. And No Way Home will be no exception, making its digital premiere on Starz… at some point “over the next six months.”
In other words, no way to see it outside a pestilence chamber until it hits that wide target Starz is painting, which I expect to not be any sooner than the blu-ray. And if I’m going to be paying extra anyway, I may as well just buy the blu-ray instead of doing a digital rental.
But none of that’s going to help me shorten the amount of time in which I have to continue to successfully dodge spoilers.
KitKat of the week:
Snowy turned 8 yesterday, so he was excused from making the bed.
About The Author
Drew
Features Editor | Drew started behind the 8(bit)-ball in the video game world. He first became interested in anime by chance exposure on the Sci-Fi channel. Drew's the creative force behind blog-wide features, works the movie and food beats, and pioneered Damage Control’s entry into video, podcasts and streaming.
