For as long as there are webs to sling and walls to crawl on, Spider-Man will be one of pop culture’s most beloved heroes. That said, it hasn’t always been easy to leverage that popularity into a film franchise that lasts. No Spider-Man saga has ever made it beyond an initial trilogy, though not for lack of trying. Director Sam Raimi was once developing a fourth Spider-Man film, with Tobey Maguire set to reprise his role as Peter Parker, in the early 2010s, but producers at Sony eventually scrapped the idea in favor of a reboot. Meanwhile, Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man saga never made more than two movies. But Sony’s joint venture with Marvel, which brought Tom Holland’s Spidey into the latter’s cinematic universe, might just break that curse for good.
After the success of Spider-Man: No Way Home, there’s been plenty of interest in a fourth Spidey film starring Holland. The actor has shared steady updates about the potential film, and while the 2023 writers’ strike stalled the project, pieces have since been falling into place. Shang-Chi director Destin Daniel Cretton has been named as a potential director, and The Hollywood Reporter claimed that filming would begin in early 2025. That report has since been confirmed by Holland himself, who shared the latest update during an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon.
“Next summer, we start shooting,” Holland told Fallon. “Everything’s good to go — we’re nearly there.”
Though Spider-Man 4 is officially moving forward, plenty of work remains to be done. In a recent interview with the Rich Roll podcast, Holland revealed that he’d read the latest draft of the script with his co-star Zendaya. “It really lit a fire in me,” he said. “Zendaya and I sat down and read it together and we at times were bouncing around the living room, like this is a real movie worthy of the fans’ respect.”
However, Holland also said the script still “needs work” before it’s ready to shoot. “One of the things is that, with Marvel, your film is a small cog in a large machine,” Holland added. “That machine has got to keep running. You have to make sure you can fit into that timeline at the right time to benefit the bigger picture. That’s one of the challenges we’re facing.”
Finding a place for a ground-level hero like Spider-Man within the MCU hasn’t always been easy, and past Spidey stories have taken the character well out of his comfort zone. Far From Home sent him on a whirlwind trip across Europe, while his work with the Avengers has taken him to space. No Way Home, however, brought Spider-Man back to basics, setting up more grounded adventures moving forward. Hopefully, its follow-up will find a way to reconcile that choice within the sprawling Multiverse Saga, but if Holland’s optimism is anything to go by, Spider-Man’s future is in good hands.
