Spider-Man easily has one of the most interesting histories in terms of movie rights, as the character sat in limbo for years while Sony and MGM fought in court over whether Sony's Columbia Pictures or MGM owned the rights to the Marvel character. Ultimately, Sony gained the rights and produced five Spider-Man films between 2002 and 2014 (three Spider-Man films with Tobey Maguire as Spidey and two Amazing Spider-Man films with Andrew Garfield as the wallcrawler). The disappointing box office of 2014's Amazing Spider-Man 2, though, led to an unusual arrangement where Disney's Marvel Studios would begin to produce Spider-Man films for Sony in exchange for having access to Spider-Man for Marvel Studio's Avengers films.
The current arrangement (which was recently extended, with some alterations, after a brief "break-up" in 2019) has been very successful, but when Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige first pitched the idea to Sony Pictures head Amy Pascal back in late 2014, Pascal did not initially take it well, and she recalled crying and almost throwing a sandwich at Feige!
The new book, The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, detailed that fateful meeting and how Pascal initially believed that Feige was there to talk about helping Sony make a third Amazing Spider-Man film, "With a good sense of how they would like to handle the character, Feige was ready for his lunch with Pascal. What he wasn't ready for was Pascal's reaction to his proposal. The meeting was in her office at Sony. As expected, Pascal wasted no time in expressing her strong desire to have Feige be more directly involved, creatively, in the making of Sony Pictures' The Amazing Spider-Man 3. Excited about the ideas her team currently had, Pascal said she would send Feige the latest draft. 'About halfway through the delicious sandwich that she had brought in, I said, 'Amy, in all fairness, it's not gonna work,'' shares Feige."
Pascal was shocked and she was even more shocked when Feige revealed his proposal, "'We've sort of done that before. And I don't think I'm particularly helpful there.' But Feige wasn't done; he had a counterproposal: 'The only way I know how to do anything is to just do it entirely. So why don't you let us do it? Don't think of it as two studios. And don't think of it as giving another studio back the rights. No change of hands of rights. No change of hands of money. Just engage us to produce it. Just pretend it's like what DC did with Christopher Nolan. I'm not saying we're Nolan, but I am saying there is a production company that is doing this pretty well. Just engage the services of that production company to make the movie.' Pascal was taken aback."
Pascal quickly grew angry at what she felt was Feige's overstepping, "'At first, I was super resentful," she admits. 'I think I started crying and threw him out of my office, or threw a sandwich at him - I'm not sure which.' Then she started to think it through. 'By the fifth [Spider-Man] movie, we weren't giving them anything new. And I have to be honest about it, we were trying so hard to be different, we even went into places to be different that we shouldn't have. We weren't fresh anymore.'"
Pascal, though, realized that she and Feige were coming from the same place, a desire to do right by Peter Parker, the Amazing Spider-Man, and so she rethought her initial angry reaction, "Pascal called Feige back the next day after their lunch. The concept of a collaboration between Sony and Marvel Studios had not left her mind. After hearing his specific thoughts on what to do with Spider-Man in the MCU, she admits, 'The idea of putting him up against a world where everybody had everything and he had nothing was a whole new way of telling his story. I thought, 'Goddamn, that guy's smart.''"
Five films later (two solo Spider-Man films and three films with Spider-Man appearing as part of the MCU), the deal has, indeed, appeared to be very smart.
Source: The Story of Marvel Studios: The Making of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, via The Direct