More than a decade after it concluded, speculation that Sam Raimi’s Spider-man trilogy might be coming back to the silver screen has made headlines around the world recently.
On June 16th, Marvel took to Twitter and posted an image of the number four written in a font that bore uncanny similarity to the one that’s been the backbone for much of the original Spider-man trilogy’s marketing campaigns, sparking rumors that the mysterious picture could be a teaser of some sort for their long-awaited sequel.
Fans also posited that the image could, contrary to the popular opinion that it was a teaser for Spider-man 4, be a preliminary announcement for the potential comic crossover between Spider-man and the Fantastic Four or perhaps even a comic-book adaptation of the Raimi films, picking up where they had left us.
Nonetheless, hopes were soon dashed after Marvel posted a similar image of the number 3 the very next day, following it up with the remaining digits of the countdown through the week, with Marvel editor-in-chief C.B. Cebulski tweeting out that neither of the aforementioned fan theories about future Marvel comic story-lines was coming to fruition.
It must be mentioned that Cebulski didn’t necessarily rule out Spider-man 4 in his tweet, and the true nature of what Marvel had been teasing remains very much in the air given that there hasn’t been any formal announcement about what exactly they pertained to – so don’t lose faith just yet.
Of course, the very reason we didn’t have Spider-man 4 back in the day was due to creative differences.
Raimi had been less than satisfied with his experience working on the third installment of the franchise back in 2008, reportedly being unhappy about the forced inclusion of some characters that he didn’t desire in his narrative by higher-ups at Marvel and Sony, and the general direction they envisioned for the franchise’s future.
This prompted the director to abandon the sequel altogether, a decision that led to Sony Pictures later rebooting the franchise for the ill-fated Amazing Spider-man series starring Andrew Garfield as the eponymous protagonist.
The friendly neighborhood vigilante has since had much success as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) but with merely one film remaining on Tom Holland’s contract beyond the upcoming Spider-man: Far From Home. And the cinematic rights for the character set to return to Sony soon enough, a reboot or the like might perhaps become a necessity yet again.
And, with the studio having successfully laid the groundwork for a new Spider-verse with 2018’s Venom starring Tom Hardy, it’s not difficult to imagine that veterans of the franchise like Raimi and Tobey Maguire might be lured back to reinvigorate the character they’d first popularized on-screen.