For years now, actor Vincent D’Onofrio has said that there are complex legal reasons why his version of Wilson Fisk/the Kingpin from Daredevil can’t appear in any Spider-Man live-action movie. After all, it’s a question fans have often asked him. Because every Marvel fan wants to see Kingpin vs. Tom Holland’s Peter Parker/Spider-Man. But now, Marvel Studios’ Kevin Feige has said that those Kingpin rights are not as complicated as D’Onofrio might think. Josh Horowitz of the Happy Sad Confused podcast asked him directly about the Kingpin holdup. And here’s what Feige said on whether Kingpin could ever appear in a Spider-Man movie and the state of the rights in question:
They’re not, they’re not [complicated]. There are things to navigate, like everything else. We talked about all those characters at some point.
Nerdist Take: Kingpin Having Rights So Complicated He Couldn’t Appear in a Spidey Movie Never Made Any Sense to Us
D’Onofrio’s comments never made much sense to us. After all, Marvel licensed the character of Wilson Fisk/Kingpin to Twentieth Century Fox for the 2003 Daredevil movie, so the Sony Spider-Man films could not use the character in the early 2000s films. But since that time, Disney bought Fox. So there doesn’t seem to be any reason why Sony couldn’t use the character of Kingpin in a movie, Spider-Man or otherwise. This feels especially true since Kingpin already appeared in a major piece of Spider-Man media, 2018’s Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. More likely, D’Onofrio just got his wires crossed.
Here’s Why We Want to See Spider-Man and Kingpin Meet on the Big Screen
Kingpin originally appeared in the pages of Amazing Spider-Man back in the ’60s, before writer/artist Frank Miller positioned him as a major Daredevil foe. But his roots as a bad guy really began with Spidey. We think fans would love to see perhaps the final battle between Daredevil and Kingpin as part of a Spider-Man team-up movie of some sort. After all, Peter Parker already knows Charlie Cox’s Matt Murdock from Spider-Man: No Way Home. Now, how fun would it be if these two teamed up to take down Fisk once and for all? There’s your pitch for a Spider-Man 6 movie right there.