When news broke late last night of Marvel and Sony’s groundbreaking deal to reunite Spider-Man with his original comic book compadres, one caveat that was buried beneath the excitement is the fact that it is the latter company that still exerts creative control over your friendly neighbourhood web-slinger.
It’s a facet that we will no doubt learn much more about in the coming months, as the full details of this new-fangled partnership comes to the fore. But for now, it’s understood that Sony is planning to reboot the solo franchise with a “much younger” actor, confirming that 31-year old Andrew Garfield will not reprise his role as the titular everyday hero. As a result, according to the Hollywood Reporter, director Marc Webb will also forgo a return to the franchise, meaning that the standalone, Marvel-produced Spider-Man film of 2017 will effectively be a hard reset.
At least, that appears to be the case for the majority of talent attached to the Amazing reboots, though we understand that producers Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach — often regarded as the gatekeepers to the Spider-Man property — will once again shepherd a next iteration of Peter Parker onto the screen in a couple of years time. As we alluded to earlier, this vision will be shaped by Marvel’s Kevin Feige and Amy Pascal.
But after two origin stories of the character in the space of a decade, surely Sony will opt to rework the way in which it introduces the character to the audience. Much like Batman, the formative events that turned Peter Parker into the webcrawler is all but common knowledge, so we expect that the creative team will at least choose to offer up something different on this occasion. The third time’s a charm, after all.
As of now, there’s no specific details as to how long this agreement over Spidey will last. The Hollywood Reporter writes that this is the first stage in Marvel’s plan to re-acquire the character outright, though that won’t be before Spider-Man makes an appearance in Captain America: Civil War in 2016.
