The internet is awash with fan-made movies made by enthusiastic amateurs seeking to tell their own stories set in familiar universes, but Spider-Man: Lotus ended up becoming one of the most widely-known for reasons that eventually covered opposite ends of the spectrum.
The first trailer for Gavin J. Konop’s passion project garnered millions of views on YouTube, with many praising the impressive production values and heartfelt storyline that saw Warden Wayne’s Peter Parker coping with the emotional fallout from the death of Gwen Stacy.
Not only that, but Lotus went so viral it caught the eye of both Andrew Garfield and Homecoming, Far From Home, and No Way Home director Jon Watts, making it one of the most high-profile Marvel bootlegs of all-time. That’s still technically true, except the circumstances couldn’t be more different.
After racist social media posts made by Wayne were uncovered, the backlash against Lotus was as fierce as it was fast. He may have apologized, but then Konop almost instantly got caught up in the storm. The end product finally has a release date of August 10, but as you can imagine, nobody cares.
There will no doubt be folks out there who seek down Spider-Man: Lotus in an attempt to separate the art from its artists given the voluminous amount of buzz it had drummed up in a previous life, but it would be sizeable understatement to say the damage has already long since been done.
For a while, it was riding on some stellar coattails, but it’s now destined to be little more than a footnote.