'Captain America: Civil War': Why Haven't We Seen The New Spider-Man Yet?

Fans have been patiently waiting for a first look at the new Spider-Man who will be debuting in Captain America: Civil War. Even though we know sequences were shot with Spider-Man on the set of the sequel, no set photos were snagged, and there have been no leaks regarding the webcrawler's costume. So what's the holdup?

Well, besides wanting to keep some surprises for fans in the movie, Anthony & Joe Russo recently explained at a Q&A that a big part of the reason we haven't seen Spidey yet is because of all the deals that needed to be made, and apparently still need to be made, between Disney/Marvel and Sony to share the character. Find out more below!

The Russo brothers recently appeared for a nearly hour-long Q&A following a special screening of Captain America: The Winter Soldier hosted by our friends at Collider. The whole conversation is a fascinating one, and you can watch it below if you wish, but for our purposes, the part about why we haven't seen Spider-Man in Captain America Civil War comes around the 37:26 mark:

For those of you who can't watch the video or would just rather read, here's what they say:

Part of the reasons of what was so secretive was that the deals were always lagging slightly behind how we were using the character. We were always in danger of upsetting the deal—there were still sensitive issues going on between the two studios that they needed to agree on. When we were casting Tom Holland, when we were screen-testing him for the movie there was a whole very involved kind of process that was under the radar and secretive, because of the fact that it was still a sensitive business issue.

... The reason why I preface that is we're still kind of in "deal zone". The reason why we still won't talk about [the costume] is that Marvel and Sony still have to work out what uses they have for the character, on a promotional level, on a commercial level. There's still complications as far as that goes that involves business deals.

So we're a few months out from the release of Captain America: Civil War and Disney/Marvel and Sony are still figuring out who is going to get money for lunchboxes, t-shirts and piñatas. That's why we haven't seen Spider-Man yet. It's not surprising that there's a lot of paperwork and red tape that needs to be figured out. Surely Sony wanted to make sure they get what's coming to them for letting Spider-Man roam the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but surely Disney/Marvel want a piece of the pie since he's debuting in their movie. It's a mutually beneficial relationship, but it's also a complicated one.

The good news is that we'll all end up benefiting from all the bureaucratic nonsense once Captain America: Civil War arrives on May 6th. But hopefully we'll have actually seen Spider-Man before then.