Ever since the Avengers swooped into multiplexes and helped rescue Hollywood's year with a gargantuan $1.39bn haul, the prospect of further superhero ensemble movies has been pretty inevitable. Last week, it was revealed that Warner Bros is reviving plans for a Justice League movie starring Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, and over the weekend at a US junket for The Amazing Spider-Man one intrepid blogger managed to get producers Avi Arad and Matthew Tolmach to talk about the chances of the webslinger meeting the likes of Iron Man, Thor and the Hulk on the big screen.

And why not, you may ask. In the comic books, Spidey was a member of the fairly recent New Avengers alongside such luminaries as Luke Cage, Wolverine, Captain America and Spider-Woman. He's also been known to knock around with the Hulk and Reed Richards of the Fantastic Four. Superhero team-ups are a fixture of the genre, and none of the above is a problem in print because all the characters are owned by comic book firm Marvel. So while you're unlikely to see rival outfit DC's Batman battling Spider-Man, there's a good chance that Iron Man will share the odd shawarma with Wolverine (in fact there's an officially endorsed Japanese anime that brings the pair together), and the caped crusader has occasionally gone up against Superman (famously so in Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns).

Avengers Assemble (titled simply The Avengers in sensible territories) broke the mould by delivering Iron Man, Thor, Captain America and the Hulk in the same movie, but only because Marvel Studios, which launched four years ago with 2008's Iron Man, had held on to the movie rights to these characters. Spider-Man had earlier been sold off to Sony, while the Fantastic Four belong to Twentieth Century Fox – and never the twain shall meet. Louis Leterrier, director of the rather ropey The Incredible Hulk, discovered this to his dismay when he tried to include a tiny portion of the Spider-Man universe in his 2008 film, and was told it wasn't going to happen.

"The university at the end [of the film] is Columbia University. Columbia University in the Marvel world, especially in the Spider-Man world, is Empire State University," the director explained a few years back. "I wanted some kind of shot where you're like, 'Oh my god. Is that Peter Parker?' That would have been fun!

"I just wanted to call it Empire University – to treat it like a coherent world. And Sony, who has the rights to Spidey, didn't want us to do that. It was a small thing but something we couldn't do."

Flash forward to 2012 and things seem to have changed. "Everything is possible," Arad told Craveonline.com. "If something like that happens, it's great for [Marvel's parent company] Disney, it's great for Sony. Avengers to me was an expected success so I never looked at it because Avengers was successful. Team-ups can happen once you create the character, establish the CG, otherwise it's not affordable."

Arad also spoke about Sony's plans for a Venom spin-off. Those of you unfortunate enough to sit through the final Sam Raimi Spider-Man film, which Sony managed to ruin by forcing the famous symbiote storyline into a screenplay already crowded with bad guys, may remember that this one has been on the cards for a while. Perhaps aware that movies based entirely around supervillains are not exactly flavour of the month, the studio now plans to focus on the character's host Eddie Brock prior to his encounter with Spidey. Borrowing somewhat from the comics but switching the timeline around drastically, the big-screen Venom will be a protector of the innocent, with his hatred of the webslinger apparently due to come later.

"The truth is he also deserves his own movie," Tolmach told Crave. "We've been sitting around in a room talking about Venom stories and it's a really full-bodied complicated character, Eddie Brock and this character. Maybe people feel there wasn't enough of a chance to unravel it, but we're all in on him."

Added Arad: We [plan to] put him in a certain position and concentrate on the human, not on the creature, which I thought was a really good beginning in 3."

What's interesting here is that Sony are finally coming round to a more enlightened point of view with regard to their superhero properties, while somehow remaining shackled to an outdated perspective that they really ought to have dispensed with by now. A movie in which Spider-Man met Hulk and the Avengers, realised well, would be a spectacular box-office draw and well worth the time and effort spent clearing up all the legal paperwork. It's a classic example of joined-up thinking and, with the success of Avengers Assemble, probably something of a shoo-in for the future.

Contrast this with Sony's obsession with bringing a solo Venom movie to the table. While the alien symbiote idea is one of the most imaginative and startlingly original in Marvel's entire canon, any spin-off film was clearly dependent on Topher Grace's Eddie Brock getting a positive reception in Spider-Man 3. Since most people thought the studio bungled both the movie and the character's introduction, there is no appetite whatsoever for Venom: The Movie.

Hero, supervillain … whatever … the idea died when Raimi's film bombed with critics and fans. The one and only reason that Sony are still flogging this particular dead horse must be that they have rights to the character through their purchase of the Spider-Man universe a few years back.

So here's my advice: the whole of Hollywood, not just Sony, should focus right now on clearing up the legal obstacles to bringing Marvel superheroes owned by different studios to the big screen, rather than dreaming up ways to squeeze the last drop of blood from the rights they already have. That's the only plan which makes sense at this point: it's what people want to see at their local multiplex and it's the blueprint that's likely to make everyone the most money. Let us imagine for a moment the (admittedly rather crowded) joys of X-Men v Spider-Man v the Avengers and the Hulk in glorious stereoscope on a giant Imax screen somewhere. And then remember that it's probably best not to hold our collective breath.