Amid the fuss and furor of the massive Sony Pictures e-mail hack that nearly brought the powerful Hollywood movie studio to its knees late last year, one piece of information regarding their future franchise plans managed to stay secret. Until now…

A while back, Sony and Marvel Studios reached a deal to share the popular Spider-Man character, a move that pleased many longtime fans of the iconic superhero who believe that the Marvel Cinematic Universe is where he truly belongs. Something that wasn’t revealed to the world when the news broke was Sony’s intentions to unite their Spider-Man franchise with the shared universe they’re developing around their stagnant Ghostbusters property. The idea is to bring each and every one of their exploitable franchises under one massive umbrella, and since all they have right now are Spider-Man and Ghostbusters, they have a heckuva task on their hands.

How does Sony intend to bring the Wall-Crawler and the Stream-Crossers together on the big screen? Glad you asked. The studio’s newly installed Motion Picture Division Chairman Tom Rothman said the following during a press conference, that quickly devolved into a sweaty, barely coherent rant:

Rothman then left a roomful of reporters after saying, “And that is what we in the industry like to call…a story conference. You’re welcome.” Later in the day, according to eyewitnesses, he got into a fistfight with a male approximately half his age who was dressed as a Sentinel from the X-Men comics. As he reigned one weak, pampered blow after another on the amused bystander, Rothman could be heard screaming, “YOU’RE NOT REAL! GET AWAY FROM ME!” It was quite sad.

An executive at Sony, who (understandably) wished to remain nameless, followed up Rothman’s statement by sharing some of the other ideas that they and certain colleagues have been batting around. The most heavily favored is a Strangers on a Train-style crossover where Spider-Man and the Ghostbusters make an arrangement to battle each other’s archenemies, because the sight of the ‘Busters going up against Electro with their proton packs while Spidey attempts to bring down the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man with his webbing to no avail, could be, in the words of the anonymous exec, “amazeballs.” The possibilities, unfortunately, are endless.

The earliest that Spider-Man could cross paths with those wacky ghoul chasers for a fleeting moment might be Paul Feig‘s Ghostbusters reboot, which is set for a July 22, 2016 release and stars Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones, and Kate McKinnon. When asked to comment about Sony’s rather unorthodox strategy of integrating the two seemingly unconnected franchises, Feig laughed for about twenty minutes before saying, “Wow, you’re being serious, aren’t you?”

The best possible outcome from Sony’s Spider-Man/Ghostbusters crossover plans may be the one that is the most difficult to confirm as fact: anonymous sources from deep within the studio’s upper echelon claim to know of several prominent Sony Pictures executives who are really embedded Marvel Studios spies expertly trained in the art of feigning complete incompetence as part of a fiendish plot to legally outmaneuver Sony into giving up every one of their biggest franchise properties to Marvel and Disney while still believing they are in possession of all of the cards. Hopefully this will happen in time for The Avengers: Infinity War Part II, where plans are already afoot to resurrect Gozer the Gozerian for an ultimate team-up with Thanos that only a union of every hero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe plus the new Ghostbusters can defeat.

[Source: AFD]