Wow! Hindsight makes fools of us all, but this cavalier response as told to author Ben Fritz for the book The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies (via Wall Street Journal) has to be extremely tough for Sony to look back at now. Marvel went on to sell the rights to Spider-Man alone for $7 million, and it's hard to argue that Sony got its money's worth. The first three films were extremely commercially successful, and some of them were quite good, but what could have been has to have some people kicking themselves to this day. For a relative pittance more, we could be talking about Sony's Black Panther and the Sony Cinematic Universe. Disney bought Marvel for $4 billion in 2009, and now that looks like a steal. To think that Sony could have had something approximating that for a cool $25 million is fascinating.