A deal to free up Spider-Man to appear in the Marvel cinematic universe, starting in 2017, is a clear admission by Sony that its superhero strategy with one of the most popular comicbook heroes around simply isn’t working.

That’s especially true at a time when the studio is desperate for some major film franchises. Struggling with one of the comicbook industry’s most popular superheroes was starting to get embarrassing — especially when “Guardians of the Galaxy,” starring a cast of misfits unknown to most moviegoers, broke out as a bigger hit in 2014 than the last “Spider-Man” movie when it made $774 million. “The Amazing Spider Man 2″ earned nearly $709 million worldwide.

“The Amazing Spider-Man 2″ just wasn’t the billion-dollar hit that Sony’s Amy Pascal had been looking for last year — and needed to be in order to keep full control over the character. That movie became the lowest grossing film of Sony’s five Spidey films to date, and forced the studio to instantly start rethinking its plans for the character, even giving up a piece of the franchise.

Now, over the years there has been a few characters to come out of Marvel that have been suspiciously close to those of DC Comics', and not small ones at that. Marvel are definitely not the only ones guilty of a bit of attribute borrowing as can be seen from DC's clear doppelganger of "The Lizard", "Killer Croc." It can go both ways and I'm sure a lot of people will have different opinions and that's great. Please feel free to leave your comments and opinions in the comment section at the bottom of the page.

Take a moment to compose yourself.

This huge development has been in the works for some time in Jonathan Hickman’s years-long Avengers saga. The heroes have been trying to stop a series of universe-ending “incursions” where two universes collide with one another. The inciting incident to May’s eight-part Secret Wars event will be when the heroes fail to stop the regular and Ultimate universes from crashing together. The resulting Battleworld will the Marvel Universe going forward.