NEW YORK – Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has big plans for Tom Holland’s Spider-Man now that the wall-crawler is part of Marvel’s Cinematic universe.

Up until last year’s Captain America: Civil War, the character – who is owned by Sony Pictures – had been the one hero that Feige was not able to integrate into the MCU. Feige has been the architect of the cinematic superhero landscape that launched with Iron Man in 2008 with Robert Downey Jr. and (so far) continues through to an untitled Spider-Man sequel in 2019.

But after The Amazing Spider-Man 2 with Andrew Garfield disappointed both financially and critically in 2014, former Sony head Amy Pascal approached the Marvel boss to see about the possibility of working together.

“It was a casual lunch,” Feige recalls. “She talked about their plans for Spider-Man and wanted our input and I said, ‘Why don’t you let us produce it and keep it a Sony movie?’ I pitched her on what I thought this could be – high school, MCU, Vulture, mentor Tony, introduced in Civil War, even the title came out of those meetings – Homecoming.”

Pretty quickly, Sony’s plans for additional movies with Garfield were scrapped, as was their vision for a villain-centric Sinister Six spinoff with Jamie Foxx and Dane DeHaan.

Holland, now 21, was cast as Peter Parker/ Spider-Man and made his debut alongside the Avengers in Civil War.

Spider-Man: Homecoming (out Friday) picks up with the web-slinger back home in New York with a new suit (courtesy of RDJ’s Tony Stark), girl problems at school and a villain (Michael Keaton’s Vulture) that wants to kill him.

Now that Spider-Man is back with Marvel, Feige spoke with the Sun about his plans for the character, what fans can expect from Avengers: Infinity War and whether Marvel will ever make an R-rated superhero movie.

How important was it to get Spider-Man for the future of the MCU?

We have access to 8,000-plus characters in the Marvel universe, so it wasn’t imperative that we did Spider-Man. But we were really passionate about taking Spider-Man and, instead of doing a third reboot, doing the first iteration of him in the MCU. My pitch was, ‘It’s a Sony movie, but let Marvel Studios produce it.’ It’ll be the first time he can interact with other heroes. It’ll be the first time we see him in high school. It’ll be the first time we see him wanting to join a superhero team, which is something that happened in one of his first issues back in the early ‘60s. To have all of these firsts is what led up to the movie that you see.

How did you pick the Vulture for the villain?

We were excited by all the villains people hadn’t seen before and what we could do with those. We liked the idea of exploring what it would be like to live in this world where there’s the Avengers tower over there and aliens were pouring out of the sky and you saw on the news a hammer fell in a desert and a super soldier came back alive and I guess you could occasionally see a S.H.I.E.L.D. heli-carrier sometimes. What would that be like? There was a lot of destruction left over from these battles and a lot of equipment and what if somebody got their hands on that equipment and knew a tinkerer who was good at making new things out of them? So very early on we thought the Vulture would be a creation based on technology.

So much of our universe is based on technological advancements. So we liked the idea of not having a Spider-Man villain that had a scientific accident befall him to turn into the villain. Vulture in the books always built his wings. So that became a natural progression of somebody who scavenges leftover alien tech and Stark tech and Ultron tech and uses it to his own devices.

What made Tom Holland perfect?

Ultimately he was one of five finalists who came and did a reading with Robert Downey Jr. It was Tom and Robert together that was special. The dynamic between the real Tom and the real Robert was almost identical to the dynamic we were hoping to get between Peter Parker and Tony Stark.

Will Sony’s Venom spinoff with Tom Hardy be integrated into the MCU?

No, it’s completely separate.

The Spider-Man sequel has already been dated for July 5, 2019. What does that represent?

We are looking at a five-movie storyline — Civil War, Homecoming, Avengers: Infinity War, untitled Avengers, Homecoming 2 — or whatever we end up calling it — as an amazing five-story journey for Peter Parker. In the way that the events of Civil War directly inform the opening of Homecoming and his state of mind as he goes back to high school, so too will the events of the next two Avengers movies as he continues with high school. This original 22-movie arc ends with the untitled Avengers in May of 2019 and then two months later it will be Peter and Spider-Man (on July 5, 2019) that usher us into the aftermath and how things proceed from there.

In addition to the MCU, you have the Cosmic Universe kicking off with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3. What will that entail?

More storytelling avenues. More places to tell stories, more characters to tell stories with. Certainly those stories connect, as we’ll see with Infinity War in a very big way. Whatever happens with Vol. 3 and beyond remains to be seen.

What can fans expect from Avengers: Infinity War?

We’re on day 73 of 90 on Infinity War right now and then we shut down for three weeks and then we start filming untitled Avengers. It is a very big undertaking; both what’s on the screen and what’s going on behind the scenes to make it possible. It is very ambitious.

Will Marvel do an R-rated movie?

Deadpool and Logan were unbelievably different kinds of movies and excellent. But we have no plans right now as we build towards Infinity War and the next seven movies that we’re working on. We haven’t found ourselves in a position where we couldn’t tell the story we wanted to tell where we would have been hindered by a rating.

Can you see a Marvel landscape that Robert Downey Jr. isn’t part of?

Luckily those seven movies we just talked about – Thor: Ragnarok, Black Panther, Avengers: Infinity War, Ant-Man & the Wasp, Captain Marvel, untitled Avengers 4 and Homecoming 2 – I don’t have to worry about that any time soon. I do think Iron Man, like Spider-Man, like Batman, like Superman, like James Bond has existed long before most of us were around and will exist long after most of us are gone. So it’s inevitable at some point, but certainly nothing I have to think about anytime soon.

The last time we spoke, you told me the MCU blueprint goes until 2023. Where’s it at now?

A few years past that. We have and are continuing to plot out the MCU post the next two Avengers films and what’s exciting is that the next Spider-Man will kick that off.

Does Ragnarok mark the end of a Thor trilogy?

I think that we are finding ourselves as we complete Phase 3 and finish this 22-movie narrative that it’s working out that way. We did three Iron Man films, three Captain America films, three Thor films. Things change drastically in Ragnarok and then build directly into Infinity War.

Do you have an idea yet of who you want as the villain for the next Spider-Man?

We are excited to use characters that you haven’t seen before on screen. So that narrows it down a little bit in terms of who will pop up next. Spider-Man has an embarrassment of riches when it comes to villains and there are a lot that haven’t been touched upon. It’s those that we will be looking at first.

Twitter: @markhdaniell

MDaniell@postmedia.com