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“It’s a very hard thing for Marvel to use my character,” D’Onofrio said. “It’s a very hard thing to do because of ownership and stuff. Right now, it’s still I’m only usable for television series … not even a one-off Fisk movie or anything like that. It’s all caught up in rights stuff right now. I don’t know when that would work out of if it’d ever work out at all, actually.”
D’Onofrio has been open about rights issues concerning Kingpin in the past. Last year, when addressing the character’s absence from the animated series Your Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man, he explained that Kingpin is “caught in between Marvel and Sony” and he never knows where the villain can show up next.
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Recently, there were rumors that Kingpin is going to be the main villain in Spider-Man 4, speculation that D’Onofrio himself debunked. After playing the character on Netflix’s Daredevil, he has reprised the role in Marvel Studios television productions, appearing on Hawkeye and Echo before Daredevil: Born Again debuted in March.
It would be interesting to know the exact specifics of the Kingpin rights issues. Sony still distributes solo MCU Spider-Man films as part of its deal with Disney, so if Kingpin is one of those characters “caught between Marvel and Sony,” he could seemingly still appear in a Spider-Man movie without causing any issues. After all, a different version of Kingpin was the villain in 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. There must be some kind of detail in Sony and Disney’s agreement that prevents the live-action Kingpin from appearing on the big screen. While the character is part of Spider-Man’s rogues gallery, he’s equally famous for being a Daredevil foe. Understandably, Marvel Studios wanted to use Kingpin for any Daredevil-related projects, so perhaps it had to agree that Wilson Fisk won’t be in any of its movies for that to happen.
Spider-Man has no shortage of great enemies to build a movie around, but it would still be a shame if Tom Holland’s Peter Parker never got to cross paths with D’Onofrio’s Kingpin. The characters share a rich history across various mediums, and that dynamic would make for a compelling film. It would also be an easy way to deliver a street-level Spider-Man movie so many fans are interested in seeing. Hopefully, Kingpin isn’t relegated to TV forever. If Sony and Disney found a way to bring Spider-Man into the MCU, the studios could probably figure out a way around this Kingpin issue. For now, it sounds like Spider-Man 4 will happen without D’Onofrio’s involvement.
