What would Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 4 have been? It's a question Spidey fans everywhere have wondered wistfully for well over a decade now.
The sequel to 2007's divisive Spider-Man 3 was originally slated for a 2011 release, and everything looked good! Tobey Maguire was returning as Peter Parker, Vulture was to be the villain, and Raimi was keen to make another movie that lived up to the quality of Spider-Man 2.
Take a look at our chat with the current Spidey - Tom Holland - below!
But it wasn't to be. Sony's need to churn out a certain number of Spider-Man movies in a set period of time so the rights didn't revert back to Marvel didn't quite gel with Sam Raimi's desire to make a quality movie. And so he walked. Sony instead opted to reboot the character with Andrew Garfield, and The Amazing Spider-Man was born.
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It was a fairly unceremonious end for Maguire's incarnation of the webslinger. Fortunately, he was able to return alongside Andrew Garfield's Spidey in last year's Spider-Man: No Way Home and provide some closure for fans. But while most of us saw this as a final goodbye to the original big screen Spidey, Raimi believes it could well have opened the door for the mythical Spider-Man 4.
Raimi has made his return to the world of comic book superheroes in the upcoming Doctor Strange In The Multiverse Of Madness. And now that both he and Maguire are established in the MCU, he's touched on the possibility of the pair working together again.
“I’ve come to realize after making Doctor Strange that anything is possible, really anything in the Marvel universe, any team-ups,” said Raimi in a recent interview with Fandango. “I love Tobey. I love Kirsten Dunst. I think all things are possible. I don’t really have a story or a plan. I don’t know if Marvel would be interested in that right now. I don’t know what their thoughts are about that. I haven’t really pursued that. But it sounds beautiful. Even if it wasn’t a Spider-Man movie, I’d love to work with Tobey again, in a different role.”
A couple of years ago I'd have said Spider-Man 4 was outright impossible. But after seeing three different Spider-Men fight Green Goblin on top of a giant replica of Captain America's shield, I'm with Raimi: anything could happen in the MCU.
Featured Image Credit: SonyTopics: Spider Man