Spider-Man: No Way Home comes out on December 17, and people are very excited. Ticket pre-orders crashed several theater websites, with analysts hopeful that Tom Holland’s third outing as Spider-Man may be the first pandemic-era movie to earn over $100 million in its opening weekend.
And why not? The Spider-Man movies have already been a success, and No Way Home brings in lots of other elements, including Benedict Cumberbatch’s Doctor Strange as well as lots of villains (and probably heroes) from Spider-Man movies past. They’re throwing the kitchen sink is with this one.
With that kind of hype, it’s no wonder that Sony executive Amy Pascal wants to make more Spider-Man movies with Holland. “This is not the last movie that we are going to make with Marvel — the last Spider-Man movie,” she recently told Fandango. “We are getting ready to make the next Spider-Man movie with Tom Holland and Marvel, it just isn’t part of … we’re thinking of this as three films, and now we’re going to go onto the next three. This is not the last of our MCU movies.”
Three films! They’re already planning another Spider-Man trilogy, although Pascal is mindful that the story comes first:
"I would say there’s so many things that we’re going to be able to explore, but what we always have to do before we decide who the villain is going to be, and what Spidey goes up against, is what is the story we’re telling about? You know? What’s the Peter Parker story we’re telling? What’s the Miles Morales story that we’re telling? But we always have to start with that. The good thing about these movies is as big as the canvas they take place on can be, they are always just stories about a kid."
Well, they’re stories about a kid until Tom Holland is still playing Peter Parker in his 30s.
Tom Holland doesn’t want to be playing Spider-Man when he’s 30…but he will be
Speaking of that, Pascal’s assurances somewhat contradict what Holland himself has been saying about his future as Spider-Man lately. “If I’m playing Spider-Man after I’m 30, I’ve done something wrong,” he recently told GQ. Holland was 19 when he started playing Spider-Man and is now 25. If he plays the character for three more movies, it’s going to be very hard to act like Peter Parker is still in high school.
That said, Holland has also seemed open to the possibility of doing more, even if he hedges a bit. “We were all treating [No Way Home] as the end of a franchise,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “I think if we were lucky enough to dive into these characters again, you’d be seeing a very different version. It would no longer be the Homecoming trilogy. We would give it some time and try to build something different and tonally change the films. Whether that happens or not, I don’t know. But we were definitely treating [No Way Home] like it was coming to an end, and it felt like it.”
Let’s be honest: studios would never allow anything this successful to come to an end. We were always going to get more Spider-Man, so we might as well enjoy!
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h/t Polygon