Marvel Studios introduced the MCU's Peter Parker in Captain America: Civil War, with Tom Holland taking over the role from Andrew Garfield after he'd played the hero in The Amazing Spider-Man movies.
That was in 2016 and, the following year, Spider-Man: Homecoming was released in theaters. Jon Watts came on board to helm that reboot, later returning for Spider-Man: Far From Home and 2021's record-breaking (and theater-saving) Spider-Man: No Way Home.
It's no secret that Watts struggled with the conclusion to his trilogy, largely due to the sheer scale of the movie and the difficulties imposed on the production by COVID-19.
Since then, the filmmaker has dropped out of helming Marvel Studios' Fantastic Four reboot and instead focused on developing Star Wars: Skeleton Crew for Lucasfilm and Disney+. The question is, will he return to take charge of Spider-Man 4?
There have been rumblings for a while that he might not and, according to scooper @MyTimeToShineH, "I was able to confirm that Jon Watts is not coming back to direct Tom Holland's Spider-Man 4."
Drew Goddard, who previously worked on Daredevil and the ill-fated Sinister Six, has been named as a likely replacement and a new trilogy could benefit from a set of fresh eyes. Watts' work on Spider-Man was stellar, though, and his vision for the wall-crawler will undoubtedly be missed.
"When we were doing [Spider-Man] Homecoming, the discussions were always about how we do something that you haven't seen before with Peter Parker," the filmmaker said of his vision for the trilogy last year. "That steers you down a couple different paths and leads you to doing things like having his best friend find out his identity, and having his aunt find out, and then, at the end of the last movie, having the whole world find out."
"That was a fun thing to play with these new aspects. But in the end, it was nice to be able to have everything coalesce into, at its essence, the simple story of Spider-Man. We just really all took our time telling the first issue of Spider-Man - that origin story."
There's still no word on when Spider-Man 4 will be released, but with rumours swirling that Peter will be a lead character in the next Avengers movie, it will surely need to swing into theaters sometime before 2026.
Recently, it's been reported that Marvel Studios and Sony Pictures are at loggerheads over whether to make the movie a street-level adventure or another Multiversal adventure co-starring Tobey Maguire and Garfield. As of now, we still don't know which direction it's heading in.
Check out our 2019 interview with Watts in the player below.