For all you web-heads out there who had been holding out hope for a fourth Sam Raimi directed Spider-Man movie starring Tobey Maguire, I’ve got some unfortunate news. As the ridiculously talented director has been making the press rounds, promoting his new horror-thriller Send Help, he has invariably been bombarded with questions pertaining to his formative role in the world of superhero movies. This has led to Raimi revealing several tidbits of new information, such as plans for a Darkman legacy sequel and how he would still love to direct a Batman movie. But the most pressing of all was the reveal that he has no interest in doing a potential Spider-Man 4.
When asked by ScreenRant about the possibility of fulfilling the long-delayed promise of a fourth Spider-Man film, Raimi said. “Peter Parker and MJ have gone elsewhere. It wouldn’t be right for me to go back and try to resurrect my version of this story… For a brief time, I was handed the torch to carry on after 40 years of Spider-Man comics. And then after my three movies, I handed the torch off to someone else. And I think they’ve got to keep running with the storyline and the audience that is now following the torchbearer.”
While this is a completely reasonable and understandable response from the filmmaker, perhaps what’s most interesting is how diametrically opposed it is to how Marvel Studios is currently operating. Raimi is out here promoting his brand new, original film, and Marvel Studios is busy releasing Avengers: Doomsday teasers that pull decades-outdated actors out of retirement to put on their superhero suits once more. There has even been heavy speculation that Tobey Maguire’s iteration of Spider-Man will appear in the new Avengers film, which wouldn’t be a huge surprise given that film’s planned multiversal hijinks and the fact that the actor already came back within recent memory in Spider-Man: No Way Home.
Something else to consider in these comments is that Raimi almost certainly knows what’s going to happen in these upcoming Avengers films, whether Maguire is in them or not. He is longtime friends with Kevin Feige, he directed Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness just a few short years ago, his name was in heavy conversation to direct the new Avengers films prior to the Russo Brothers signing on. Thus, the fact that Raimi is so openly dismissing the possibility may also be a bit of a hint toward the finality of those upcoming film with regard to that universe or that version of the Spider-Man character.
Ever since the film was initially called off back in the early 2010s so that Sony could instead move forward with a reboot of the character, Spider-Man 4 has been an extremely tantalizing comic book movie ‘what if?’ But with these latest comments from the mouth of Raimi himself, it seems well and truly confirmed that Spider-Man 4 is never happening.