When it was confirmed that Tobey Maguire would reprise the role of Peter Parker for Spider-Man: No Way Home, it didn't take long for rumors to spring up that Sam Raimi was in talks to helm a fourth solo movie featuring the original big-screen wall-crawler.
We didn't put too much stock into these reports at the time, but when No Way Home came out and made over a $1 billion worldwide, Sony Pictures attempting to capitalise on that success by revisiting Raimi's trilogy - as well as The Amazing Spider-Man movies starring Andrew Garfield - started to seem a lot more feasible.
Here's what Raimi had to say about the rumors during a 2024 interview.
“Well, I haven’t heard about that yet,” the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness director responded. “I did read that, but I’m not actually working on it yet. I mean, Marvel and Columbia are so successful with current Spider-Man [movies], and the track there, and I don’t know that they’re going to go back to me, and say, ‘Well, folks, we can also tell that story!'”
He continued, “I’m not sure, but I love all the new Spider-Man movies. I loved Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was really, super powerful seeing Tobey [Maguire] again in it.”
Now, we have a (potential) update on Spider-Man 4's status from an unlikely source.
The Batman - Part II co-writer Mattson Tomlin has spoken about his desire to complete Raimi's saga several times in the past, revealing that he would ideally be interested in exploring Peter Parker's struggles to balance raising a family with fighting crime. When an X user joked about giving Tomlin the money to write a script, the scribe responded with the following.
Granted, this isn't exactly much to go on, but Tomlin did follow up with: "I do enjoy how the phrasing of all this conjures the image of me dialing random numbers on the phone, holding a speaker over my head in the street, or putting messages in bottles and throwing them into the sea."
Whether anything will come of this remains to be seen, but Maguire is expected to return for Avengers: Secret Wars, so we may have a better idea of any potential future plans for his take on the character after the Multiverse Saga officially concludes.
For what it's worth, Raimi has said he would love to work with Maguire and Kirsten Dunst again.
“I’ve come to realize after making Doctor Strange that anything is possible, really anything in the Marvel universe, any team-ups,” the filmmaker said in a 2002 interview with ComicBook.com. “I love Tobey. I love Kirsten Dunst. I think all things are possible. I don’t really have a story or a plan. I don’t know if Marvel would be interested in that right now. I don’t know what their thoughts are about that. I haven’t really pursued that. But it sounds beautiful. Even if it wasn’t a Spider-Man movie, I’d love to work with Tobey again, in a different role.”
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