Spider-Man: No Way Home may have been intended as a final showcase of Tobey Maguire’s and Andrew Garfield‘s Spider-Men, but all it’s done is leave fans hungry for the former webslingers to return elsewhere in the Marvel multiverse.
That’s particularly true of Garfield, seeing as he only got the two Amazing Spider-Man movies originally and never had a fair crack at the whip. Fans would love to see more of “Peter 3” so much, in fact, that they’re even willing for an appearance in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe. Yes, that’s how desperate they are. Unfortunately, if you believe the scuttlebutt, a planned return in Madame Web never manifested.
According to Jeff “The InSneider” Sneider, Madame Web was originally shot as a kind of Amazing Spider-Man universe origins story set in the 1990s, before it was realized that the timeline didn’t add up with the age of Garfield’s Peter and so reshoots allegedly removed all references to the ’90s setting. Sneider claims that, although he won’t appear, Tom Holland is now the implied Spider-Man of Madame Web‘s timeline.
Madame Web taking place in the 1990s is a new one for us, but it has long been believed that the film is set in the early 2000s, with contextual clues in the trailers seemingly confirming this theory (e.g. period-appropriate set decorations). And remember that everyone’s assuming Adam Scott’s mystery character is actually a young Uncle Ben, meaning that the story could revolve around a baby Peter Parker.
Whether this rumor is true or not, though, the fact of the matter is that the concept of “Andrew Garfield could’ve been in Madame Web” has now been put out there and fans are immediately using it as a stick with which to beat Sony’s franchise.
“Sony gonna Sony,” “Typical Sony,” and “flop incoming” are the prevailing sentiments in response to this rumor. It seems, whether there’s anything actually to this intel or not, the Garfield chatter speaks to a deeper problem people have with Sony’s Spider-Man-less Spider-Man movies — in this age of interconnected cinematic universes, audiences just aren’t fussed about spinoff movies with wonky continuity that feel like they’ve fallen through a wormhole from 2005.
It’s worth noting that Madame Web is the first release from Sony’s Spider-Man Universe since 2022’s Morbius, and we all know how that went. Can the Dakota Johnson vehicle dispel the lingering stench of its forebear, and the disappointment caused by a supposed Andrew Garfield snub, to launch the superhero genre back into the big leagues in 2024? Maybe we don’t need to have Cassandra Webb’s psychic powers to foresee the answer to that question.
