Social Network Between Sony and Disney’s Marvel Studios
In 2015, Sony and Disney’s Marvel Studios signed a five-movie deal outlining that Spider-Man would be part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. However, recently, this past summer, it was announced that this deal would come to an end because Sony and Disney were unable to reach an agreement. During the original deal, the agreement was that Marvel would receive up to “5% of first-gross and all merchandising revenue”. Consequently, given the huge success of Spider-Man being integrated into the MCU, Disney wanted future Spider-Man films to be a 50/50 financing arrangement between. However, Sony wanted to stick with the original deal. As a result of this disagreement, Spider-Man will cease to be a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
In class, we discussed how networks evolve over time specifically asking what causes nodes to appear or disappear and as a result which edges will form or vanish. Mark Granovetter defines a strong tie as being a close friend and a weak tie as being a distant friend or acquaintance. Using that information, I would like to explore how the Sony and Disney relationship network may have evolved over time. Before the news about the dispute was announced, it was easy to assume that the relationship between Sony and Disney was represented with a strong tie. However, after the disclosure of the ill relationship between the two companies, one can see that their initial relationship should instead be represented with a weak tie. This can be deduced from the fact that Sony and Disney are two separate companies and the only real connection between the two or the reason for their partnership was for the production of the Spider-Man films. In other words, the edge that linked these two companies is inherently weak in nature because it exists only as a source of new opportunities. In addition, their original relationship should be represented by a weak tie because of how easy the link between the two companies was broken. It did not seem like either side was willing to negotiate in order to reach an agreement. In contrast, if there were a strong tie present, one would expect some negotiations and/or compromises to be made as a result of the pre-existing personal/close relationship between the two companies.
Furthermore, since Sony and Disney did not make any deals with other companies (they do not have any companies in common), the edge connecting these two companies would be classified as a local bridge. After Sony and Disney failed to reach an agreement on their new deal for future Spider-Man films, the current relationship between these two companies has ceased to exist. Therefore, the two companies exist as two separate connected components. The evolution of this network can be schematically described as shown below:
Link to the news article describing the dispute between Sony and Disney: https://www.businessinsider.com/sonys-spider-man-deal-with-disney-and-marvel-studios-explained-2019-8