Spider-Man: No Way Home was amazing, spectacular, and any other Spider-Man-related adjective you care to mention, there’s no doubt about that. But it’s also made it extremely hard to bring Tom Holland‘s webslinger back into the MCU.
Much like it’s proving an uphill battle for Marvel to follow up Avengers: Endgame in Avengers 5, Spider-Man 4 has its work cut out for it in measuring up to the multiversal threequel. I mean, where do you go after sending fans to Spidey heaven with that three-way team-up between Holland and his cinematic forebears?
Well, one concept that might just do it may have already been set up in the MCU, in perhaps the last place we’d expect some Spider-Man foreshadowing to happen: the apparently standalone Marvel Spotlight show, Echo.
Echo just handed the MCU the perfect event to adapt in Spider-Man 4
Yes, Echo may have pioneered the Spotlight banner — which is supposed to be attached to MCU series that stand apart from the crowd — but it still had one of the franchise’s unavoidable post-credits scenes in its finale. The tag scene saw Vincent D’Onofrio’s Wilson Fisk become intrigued by a news item playing on TV, which discussed how the election for the next Mayor of New York was still wide open…
There’s no mystery what this is teasing, of course, as we were already aware that Kingpin would be running for mayor in Daredevil: Born Again, coming in 2025. And yet it’s just possible that Fisk’s turn to politics in Born Again is only the beginning of what could be a major storyline encompassing the whole of the MCU’s street-level side. The perfect place for this storyline to play out? Spider-Man 4.
You see, it sure sounds like Marvel is headed for an adaptation of Devil’s Reign, the 2021-2022 comic book event. In that arc, Mayor Fisk outlaws vigilantism in New York, even deploying squads of Thunderbolts to apprehend and imprison superheroes — like Moon Knight and Reed and Sue Richards. Spider-Man is beaten to a pulp by Taskmaster, until he’s rescued by his pals the Thing and Johnny Storm. As Luke Cage plans to run against Fisk for mayor, the heroes discover Fisk is using the Purple Man’s powers to mind-control the NYC populace into supporting him.
Take a closer look at the characters mentioned above and you’ll notice that all of them are either already in the MCU or about to join the party in the coming year or so. Arguably, the thing that really excited fans about Echo was that it finally made the entire Defenders Saga canon, so the MCU would do well to bring back Jessica Jones and Luke Cage characters ASAP. Plus, building on the Daredevil/Spider-Man connection established in No Way Home and introducing a friendship between Spidey and the FF is a must.
There aren’t many directions Spider-Man 4 can go down to create an appealing MCU event on a par with its multiversal predecessor, but turning it into an Avengers-level team-up bringing back numerous characters we either thought we’d see again or never thought we’d see come together is one of them.
