Now the director of Sony’s Spider-Man 3 might leave

There’s something rotten in the state of Spider-Man. Just a few days before Disney’s D23 Expo, the news broke that Sony and Disney couldn’t come to a deal regarding the continued use of the hugely popular superhero in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, so he’s not going to be in it anymore. That doesn’t mean that Tom Holland is going to stop playing Spider-Man, but rather that any future Spider-Man movies he appears in won’t be connected in any way to the MCU. So no Nick Fury cameos, no grappling with the loss of Tony Stark, nothing.

Or maybe Sony will just recast the part and reboot the series…again. Anything is possible, and things are still very much in flux. For example, Deadline reports that Sony and Disney are currently in a tug-of-war for Jon Watts, the director of both Spider-Man: Homecoming and Spider-Man: Far From Home, both of which were tremendously successful. If Watts goes with Sony, he can keep directing Tom Holland as Spider-Man…but without Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige around to produce those films as before, will they have the same magic touch?

Alternately, Watts could abandon Spider-Man and work for Disney directing some other Marvel franchise; it’s not like there’s a lack of movies and TV shows on the horizon for him to choose from. Whatever happens, Far From Home writers Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers are signed up for a third Spider-Man movie at Sony.

We’ll see what Watts does as the messy Sony-Disney divorce continues. Caught in the middle is dear sweet Tom Holland, who just wants to shoot webs from his home-made wrist-mounted pressurized bracelets, dammit. He appeared at the D23 Expo to promote the new Pixar movie Onward, but of course the pressure was on for him to say something about Spider-Man. “It’s been a crazy week but I want you to know from the bottom of my heart that I love you 3000,” he told the crown, quoting Tony Stark’s parting words from Avengers: Endgame. Is he flying the flag for Disney there, or just reading the room?

And on top of that, according to IGN, another director has dropped out of Sony’s Uncharted movie, which has Holland signed on to play a young Nathan Drake.10 Cloverfield Lane director Dan Trachtenberg has exited the project for unknown reasons, following in the footsteps of David O. Russell, Neil Burger, Seth Gordon and Shawn Levy. Sony expects to find a new director by the end of the summer, but they’ll probably just abandon the project again, and Tom Holland will have even more reason to look in the mirror at night and wonder if it’s his fault. It’s not, though.

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