What Could Be Next For Spider-Man On The Big Screen

How do you follow up pulling off a masterpiece with an iconic fan-favorite character that took fan service to the next level? That’s a question both Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios may already be hashing out the answer to at their respective secret lairs.

Tom Holland, who played the lead Peter Parker and Spidey in the last three Spider-Man films and various Marvel movies, has said he won’t play the iconic hero forever, but also voiced he may be open to returning. Andrew Garfield, who stole various scenes in his triumphant return as the Web-Slinger in Spider-Man: No Way Home in December, told Variety earlier this week that he “has no plans” to return as Spider-Man.

To be fair, Garfield may not want to enter any truth-telling contests yet after lying repeatedly (the right move) about being in No Way Home. Like Holland and Garfield, fans have also been campaigning for another Tobey Maguire Spider-Man project after seeing the OG blockbuster Parker back in No Way Home.

Regardless, after Spider-Man: No Way Home’s smashing success as the third highest-grossing domestic film of all time ($781,623,905 via Box Office Mojo), ahead of Avatar, and the end of the film/post-credits scene setting up avenues for at least two Spider-Men to exist in separate universes, we asked Spider-Man expert and author of the book With Great Power: How Spider-Man Conquered Hollywood during the Golden Age of Comic Book Blockbusters (November 1), Sean O’Connell, what could be next for everyone’s favorite wall-crawler on the big screen.

“My personal belief is that they’re going to have a Spider-Man on the Sony side; there’s two existing universes now and the way that they showed Venom going back and forth between the two meant that there’s a clear distinction between the stuff that’s happened in, they call it ‘The Sony Pictures Universe of Marvel Characters’, and I think that’s going to be Andrew,” O’Connell, who’s also the Managing Director for CinemaBlend, said via Zoom.

“I would not be surprised if Andrew ends up becoming the Spider-Man that’s in that universe, and I think Tom will continue as the Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Now they’ve moved a piece of the Symbiote over to the MCU, it got left behind on the bar when Eddie Brock got beamed back to wherever he is.

“So far, we’ve only seen San Francisco in this Sony Universe of Marvel Characters. I don’t understand why, and when we talked to Andy Serkis, who directed Venom: Let There Be Carnage, he was talking about the Ravencroft (‘Institute For The Criminally Insane’) that they show in his movies, and he referred to it as ‘Ravencroft West’, meaning that there is a Ravencroft East, and I just wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a Spider-Man in the New York of the Venom movies and maybe that Spider-Man happens to be Andrew Garfield.”

Even though Garfield and Emma Stone aren’t an item anymore as they were when filming The Amazing Spider-Man films (2012, 2014), O’Connell isn’t ruling out her returning as a fan-favorite Marvel character upgrade, Spider-Gwen.

“Yeah, that would be fantastic,” Sean, who also authored Release the Snyder Cut: The Crazy True Story Behind the Fight That Saved Zack Snyder’s Justice League (2021) said. “Especially just because the selling point of those Marc Webb (The Amazing Spider-Man 1 and 2 director) movies was their chemistry. Now it’s a little bit complicated because they were a couple back then and that led a lot to their chemistry, and now she’s married with a child and they’ve moved on.

“But, would I like to see them try to rekindle some of that on-screen chemistry? Absolutely. And because Into the Spider-Verse (2018) did such a good job of introducing the character of Spider-Gwen, you can bring her into live action. Yeah, Emma makes a lot of sense.”