There’s a huge amount of excitement surrounding Spider-Man 4, and that may go some way in explaining why so many rumours continue to swirl about Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures’ plans for the project.
We haven’t seen the live-action wall-crawler on our screens since 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home and Tom Holland’s break from the character hasn’t exactly been a rousing success (Uncharted appears to have been a one-and-done and The Crowded Room drew mixed reviews).
Since then, he’s supposedly signed up to star in both a fourth solo outing and as a lead in the next Avengers movies. All the while, we’ve been hearing rumblings about clashes between Marvel and Sony, various directors who could be in the mix, and two very different versions of Peter Parker’s return: one with his fellow Spider-Men, and one without.
Now, we finally have a slightly more reliable update courtesy of Variety. The trade has run an in-depth piece about Euphoria‘s future and where things really stand with Spider-Man 4.
“Some believe that the success or lack thereof of Zendaya’s upcoming film ‘Challengers,’ which opens April 26, could influence ‘Euphoria’s’ fate,” reads the report, “and looming in the background, of course, is the upcoming ‘Spider-Man 4,’ though the script for that film is still being worked on, and there’s no director or start date.”
So, despite what we’ve been hearing in recent weeks, a director hasn’t boarded Spider-Man 4 and reports production will begin later this year to get the movie in theaters in 2025 appear to have been premature.
It’s unclear why Jon Watts isn’t returning after helping the MCU’s Spider-Man trilogy, though he walked away from The Fantastic Four reboot after seemingly being burned out from devoting over half a decade of his career to the web-slinger.
Drew Goddard and Justin Lin are the names supposedly in the mix for this next instalment, but with a script still being worked on, this movie clearly isn’t as close to becoming a reality as we’d hoped. A narrative that Spider-Man 4 is troubled has been created, but primarily by scoopers; this report instead suggests that it’s a movie which is simply being worked on (as you’d expect).
“All I can say is that we have been actively engaging in conversations about what it could potentially look like for a fourth rendition of my character,” Holland said last November. “Whether or not we can find a way to do justice to the character is another thing.”
“I feel very protective over Spider-Man,” the actor continued. “I feel very, very lucky that we were able to work on a franchise that got better with each movie, that got more successful with each movie, which I think is really rare, and I want to protect his legacy. So, I won’t make another one for the sake of making another one. It will have to be worth the while of the character.”
Stay tuned for updates as we have them.
