Before rebooting the franchise with the Andrew Garfield-led 2012 film “The Amazing Spider-Man,” Sony Pictures looked into doing a fourth entry in the Sam Raimi-directed franchise.
That film was to have reunited Raimi and Tobey Maguire and would’ve seen Vulture as the villain. Creative differences though led to Raimi opting out.
Recently, concept artist Jeff Henderson spoke with Slashfilm when the topic of 2018’s highly acclaimed animated feature “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” came up. Henderson revealed that a scene that was being planned for Raimi’s film actually is very akin to a key early scene in the feature.
That scene takes place after Peter Parker (Chris Pine) dies, and Mary Jane Watson delivers an emotional speech to New York City. Henderson says:
“I’ll preface this, I don’t know if this was deliberate or if this was by design. But I remember when [my fiancee] Jen and I saw the screening ‘Into the Spider-Verse,’ which I think is one of the greatest animated pieces of work ever made, the way they handled Peter’s funeral and Mary Jane speaking at his funeral and the impact it had on New York, that sequence in ‘Into the Spider-Verse’ is very similar to how he wanted to end ‘Spider-Man 4.'”
This would suggest Raimi was intending to kill off Spider-Man in that planned film, but Henderson doesn’t confirm if that’s the case. What he does make clear is he doesn’t feel anyone ripped anything off:
“I’m not suggesting that anybody ripped it off or anything. But I just mean that Sam set up a lot of stuff. That’s certainly one of the ways that I think it could have played out by design. For any writer who loved Spider-Man, I think that was definitely on the table the whole time.”
The comments come as singer Joe Jonas revealed to Variety this week that he lost out on the role of Spider-Man in “The Amazing Spider-Man” to Andrew Garfield.
Jonas says he was in the running to the point of getting callbacks and the like but lost to Garfield. Asked if he ever wore the Spidey suit, Jonas replied: “No, but I’m sure I had one that I would try on occasionally back in the day.”
Jonas currently stars in the war film “Devotion”.
