In a effort to better compete with Marvel’s roster of superhero movies, Sony announced yesterday via press release that they had hired an “all-star writing team” to help grow their Spider-Man franchise from a single series to a full-blown cinematic comic-book universe. Writers Alex Kurtzman, Roberto Orci, Jeff Pinkner, Ed Solomon, and Drew Goddard will join The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb and producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach in creating a “brain trust to expand the universe for the [Spider-Man] brand and to develop a continuous tone and thread throughout the films.” In other words, they’ll spin a web (any size) of Spider-Man movies and spinoffs.

There will be an Amazing Spider-Man 3, of course; Sony “hopes” Webb will return to direct the screenplay by Kurtzman, Orci, and Pinkner. That film will hit theaters on June 10, 2016. After that, Kurtzman, Orci, and Solomon will write a screenplay for Venom, the alien symbiote character that previously appeared as Spidey’s evil black costume in Spider-Man 3. Meanwhile Goddard, who is already working on Marvel’s Daredevil Netflix series, will write (and possibly also direct) a movie called The Sinister Six about a group of villains who team up to defeat Spider-Man. In the comics, their roster tends to fluctuate, but frequent members include Doctor Octopus, Vulture, Sandman, Mysterio, and Electro, who’s already one of the main antagonists in next summer’s Amazing Spider-Man 2. 

There have been more ambiguously motivated versions of Venom—recently, the costume attached itself to Peter Parker’s old high school bully Flash Thompson, who uses it to work as an agent of the U.S. military and as a covert member of the Avengers—but it, like the Sinister Six, is generally a pretty dark character. To date, no major comic-book franchise has devoted an entire movie to a villain, and here Sony has effectively announced two of them back-to-back. It will be interesting to see just how evil these characters behave in their own movies. Will they be given more heroic motivations? Will Spider-Man appear in them? And when will the Spider-Mobile get its own spinoff? There are so many questions left to answer.

“Until now,” said Arad and Tolmach, “we have approached each film as a separate, self-contained entity, but with this move, we have the opportunity to grow the franchise by looking to the future as we develop a continuous arc for the story. That is what Alex, Bob, Jeff, Ed, and Drew will do in this unprecedented collaboration, and we’re excited about the directions they are taking the character and the world.” The world and the “universe.” Sony explicitly uses that term to describe their Spider-Man plans five different times in this one press release. And like the actual universe, Sony’s is going to constantly expand.