While most of the world’s eyes that are interested in seeing Spider-Man on the big screen again are focused on the upcoming Captain America: Civil War and the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe projects that he’ll be involved in, there’s still more going on with the property. While Sony and Marvel have reached a deal to bring the character into the MCU, Sony is still the one with the rights, so they decided if they couldn’t make a live-action Spider-Man movie work, they'd just change the medium. The studio is now working on an animated feature film for the wall crawler, but if you were incredibly excited for that to happen, you’ll have to calm down, as it was just pushed back.
Originally set for a July 2018 release date, the movie would have debuted just about a year after the new live-action Spider-Man standalone film that will be part of the MCU and star Tom Holland as Peter Parker. According toVariety, the film now has a release date of December 21, 2018. While no reason for the delay has been given, there’s one obvious possibility.
The script treatment for the new animated film was being put together by the writing and directing team behind The Lego Movie, Phil Lord and Chris Miller. The word was that they were also interested in directing. The problem with that scheduling is that there’s another movie the two are attached to direct that is also scheduled for a summer of 2018 release: the Han Solo prequel film currently has a date of May of that year. While directing an animated movie isn’t quite the same thing as doing it for live action, it’s unlikely the pair would have been able to do both at the same time. Even pushing the movie back five months would still make directing both features difficult, but after their success with Lego as well as the Jump Street movies, these two are in pretty high demand and many studios will likely do whatever they need to make things work.
The animated Spider-Man movie will be the seventh one produced by Sony since acquiring the rights to the character from Marvel. It will also be the fourth different iteration of the character, after Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield and Holland have all played the role. Unless of course the animated version is meant to be connected to one of these previous versions. There are no real details yet about what the movie will be, which may also have something to do with the delay.
Spider-Man has existed as an animated hero for decades but this will be his first journey onto the big screen. Are you excited to see the transition, or is this just too much Spider-Man all at once?
