With all the various iterations over the years, you’d be forgiven for getting confused between the different versions of Spider-Man and the actors behind the mask.
Though there were a few actors before him, I’m going to say Tobey Maguire was the first actor to bring Spider-Man to the big screen, in the 2002 film simply titled Spider-Man.
Maguire went on to star in two more Spider-Man films before the studios revamped the character and enlisted Andrew Garfield to do so. Garfield starred in 2012’s The Amazing Spider-Man and the 2014 sequel.
It was only two years later that Marvel decided to revamp the character once again, and in 2016 we saw our first glimpse of Tom Holland as Spidey in Captain America: Civil War, before he starred in Spider-Man: Homecoming and the Avengers films.
I’m sure Marvel would’ve stuck with one actor the whole way through the franchise if they could, but seeing as Holland was only six (six!) years old when Tobey Maguire first played the character, it’s fair to say they made the right choice.
Now, however, the young actor has said he wants to see Maguire and Garfield return to the red and blue suit, wondering if a multiverse-type scenario would be possible so they could all appear in the same film.
Speaking to ComicBook, Holland said:
Of course I would love to make a movie with those guys, it would be so cool!
It would be amazing, it would be really, really cool. And it’s something that the fans really want. So whether Marvel and Sony decided to do that, it’s up to them. It’s not up to me, I can’t walk in like ‘Kevin [Feige], this is what we’re doing on the next one.’ But it would be really awesome.
As Holland points out, it’s in the hands of the studios. After the relatively disappointing performance of The Amazing Spider-Man 2 at the box office, Sony made a deal with Disney to hire Marvel Studios to make a trilogy of Spidey films, while they also allowed the web-slinger to appear in three other films in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Avengers, etc.).
Sony, meanwhile, has continued to throw its own Spider-Man shapes, with Spider-Verse, Venom and the upcoming Morbius.
However with Spider-Man: Far From Home set it swing into cinemas this summer, that leaves just one film left in the deal between the studios. Whether they continue to work together after that remains to be seen.
Spider-Man: Far From Home is in UK cinemas from July 2.
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Charlie Cocksedge is a journalist and sub-editor at UNILAD. He graduated from the University of Manchester with an MA in Creative Writing, where he learnt how to write in the third person, before getting his NCTJ. His work has also appeared in such places as The Guardian, PN Review and the bin.