Since it’s been a couple of weeks since the last major comic book character was threatened with getting killed off, Marvel announced today that the next major storyline for their Ultimate Universe, which will be called Death of Spider-Man.

Starting in February 2011 with Ultimate Spider-Man #153, writer Brian Michael Bendis will join forces with Mark Millar to tell what Bendis calls “a storyline unlike any other” and which Marvels touts “forever changes the Ultimate Comics Universe.” Ultimate Spider-Man #153 serves as a prologue for the storyline which will officially start in Ultimate Avengers vs. New Ultimates #1.

Millar stressed that this new Ultimate story event “is going to be big.”

A new animated Ultimate Spider-Man series and the previously announced animated Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes series will air on the Disney XD television channel, according to Marvel, who made the announcement this weekend at the Marvel Animation Panel at the 2010 C2E2.

“It’s nice to be a part of Disney,” said Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer Joe Quesada in reference to the first fruits of labor witnessed since his company was acquired by the Walt Disney Company in August 2009. [Read: Disney To Acquire Marvel Entertainment For $4 Billion]

The two new animated shows are just the first in what will likely be many more projects set to debut on the Disney XD network, which according to Quesada, was just one of the major benefits of the Disney deal.

If Sony’s main intention is to give the Spider-Man movie franchise a “younger” refreshed take rather than another sequel, they should consult someone who’s successfully done so in the past like Marvel scribe Brian Michael Bendis. This is the relative consensus among fans familiar with Bendis’ work on the Ultimate Spider-Man comic book series, which modernized the web head for a new generation of fans.

Both the studio and new Spider-Man director Mark Webb apparently agree with this sentiment as anyone following Bendis on Twitter found out after he told the world he “just spent a very interesting morning at Sony with the entire spidey movie team!! Very very cool stuff!!”

It didn’t take Sony Pictures long to find a new director to helm their recently decided reboot of the Spider-Man franchise. The studio has hired relatively unknown Marc Webb to take on the new high-profile, high-risk, high-reward project after the realization that we had seen the best we could have seen from the former cast and crew. The script is written by James Vanderbilt, who Sony had writing multiple sequels.

Webb recently received critical praise for his work on the indie film (500) Days of Summer, which starred Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel. Aside from that movie, Webb has only really done a couple of music videos for Green Day and 3 Doors Down. This makes him a bold choice for director, and it puts him in a massive position that could very easily make or break his entire career. No pressure there. And speaking of Gordon-Levitt, he seems to be the majority fan-favorite for the role of Peter Parker. The hiring of Webb makes this prospect a lot more of a legitimate possibility.

Continue reading for more and to read a full press release from Sony.

At the New York Comic Con‘s Cup O Joe panel, Marvel announced that the long-running comic book series Ultimate Spider-Man will get the axe soon, as will the entire Ultimate Universe line.

The news came as a “surprise” to writer Brian Michael Bendis, who joked that Editor-In-Chief Joe Quesada was dead to him. “I’m Christian Bale-ing on you!” he said.

However, a new line of books under the banner Ultimate Comics will begin very soon, Quesada replied, adding that Spider-Man is one of four ongoing books in the line. All of these titles will have the same editorial schedule as the regular line of Marvel books.