Sony Pictures is working on an animated Spider-Man movie, which is expected to hit the silver screen in 2018.

Tom Rothman, chairman of Sony Pictures, made the announcement himself at this year's CinemaCon in Las Vegas, Nevada, a gathering of the film industry's biggest players. Rothman, who replaced the ousted Amy Pascal after she became the public face of the Hollywood studio's hacking scandal, said the new Spider-Man project will be headed by industry big-leaguers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller, the duo behind critically acclaimed blockbusters such as The Lego Movie, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and 22 Jump Street.

"It will be something quite unlike anything you have seen before," Rothman said. "The highly technical term for it is 'It's f---ing awesome.'"

Lord and Miller will not be directing the film — they will write the treatment and produce the fully animated movie, along with fellow producers Avi Arad, Matt Tolmach, and Pascal. Sony has yet to disclose who will direct the new film.

Emails leaked from the Sony Pictures hack last year reveal then-chairman Pascal and Sony Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton tried to recruit the filmmaking duo to head the studio's animation division in a bid to "turn the studio around." Both, however, declined the offer, with an email from Lord stating "it's too hard to do great work in there."

Fans of Marvel's spiderweb-slinging superhero will have to wait until July 20, 2018 for this "first of its kind" film, though. Sony Pictures said the animated film will "exist independently" of the studio's live-action Spider-Man projects, which are ongoing. The next live-action Spider-Man film will hit theaters on July 28, 2017 and feature a Peter Parker as a teenager once again.

"Some of my favorite Spider-Man arcs and Spider-Man stories, he's in high school for a lot of it," said Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige, who will produce the film. "We want to explore that. That also makes him very, very different from any of our other characters in the [Marvel Cinematic Universe], which is something else we want to explore, how unique he is when now put against all other characters."

Meanwhile, Spidey's next appearance on the big screen is on May 6, 2016 in Marvel's Captain America: Civil War.

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