Well, the Sony-Marvel films are a special case. When Marvel was going bankrupt, they sold the rights to X-Men, F4, and Spiderman to Sony to try and steady the ship. The rights came with stipulations that if Sony ever let the properties lapse (generally meaning if they went X amount of time without making a new movie based on the properties), the rights would revert to Marvel. So, every so often, Sony had to “reboot” the franchises, in order to kep the rights. See, they had the rights to the characters and some major storylines (Peter Parker’s origin, the X-Men and Magneto, etc.), but none of the newer storylines, villains and material. In fact, many comic book fans accused Marvel of publishing nothing but low quality rehashes of storylines in the X-Men comic books in order to sabotage potential Sony movie plotlines, so as to reclaim the IP once Sony stopped making movies.
This is what happened to Spiderman. After the last reboot bombed, Sony gave up the extended rights to the character in films. This is why Spiderman could show up in Capt. America: Civil War... Marvel/Disney got the rights back.
So Sony really had no options but to keep remaking the same movies. It was a stupid deal that stupid suits at Sony only made worse...
Not exactly. Marvel and SONY agreed to split Spidey.
Ah I see! Thanks for the explanation!