Sam Raimi has confirmed Rachel McAdams was never considered to play a villain in the scrapped Spider-Man 4 movie.
The Tobey Maguire-starring trilogy ran from the original 2002 Marvel/Sony flick until Spider-Man 3 in 2007, but the director departed the fourth instalment over creative differences.
There was a rumour that the Notebook star was to play Black Cat, which the actress herself shot down.
Now, Raimi has confirmed that, to his knowledge, no female villains were auditioned.
He told CinemaBlend: "No. Yeah, we never had auditions for a female villain that I'm aware of. Look, I talked to John Malkovich about playing the Vulture, and he was wonderful, and we got along great. But the movie never went."
The filmmaker addressing the casting gossip comes days after he insisted he won't be getting back in the director’s chair for a fourth flick.
Speaking with Screen Rant, the 66-year-old director said: “Stan Lee’s great character - that a bullpen of writers in New York at Marvel had come up with stories for - he created the character, but so many people contributed, so many artists, that 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.”
After releasing Spider-Man 3, Raimi began to work on a treatment for a fourth film, but Sony eventually cancelled the movie in favour of rebooting the franchise with Andrew Garfield’s The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012.
Even so, Raimi had nothing but praise for the Spider-Man series and “the producers that make it” - but insisted his version had “gone elsewhere”.
Now that Spider-Man is “following a new artist” with Tom Holland and immersing fans “really into his story”, Raimi does not feel it would “be right for [him] to go back and try to resurrect [his] version of this story”.
As a result, The Evil Dead director “had to pass the torch happily” to The Amazing Spider-Man creator Mark Webb, and is “honoured to have” had it in the first place.
