Social media campaigns can be an effective way to raise awareness for a cause. In the entertainment industry alone, we saw members of Zack Snyder’s fan base lobby for – and successfully obtain – the four-hour Snyder Cut of the director’s Justice League feature. That fight was waged online for three years, and radically divided people who supported the movement, and others who deemed them trolls who were doing more harm than good. (If you are interested, I wrote a book about the whole affair. It’s a wild story.) That doesn’t mean these campaigns are slam dunks. For every Snyder Cut, there are pushes for The Ayer Cut of Suicide Squad (which one fan claims to have seen), which so far has gone unheeded. But that’s not stopping Spider-Man fans from launching their own hashtag and planning a trending event.
Die-hard hans of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy would love to see the Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness director come back to the franchise and complete his fourth film with Tobey Maguire back in the lead role. Some of this likely stems from Maguire’s return to the character in Spider-Man: No Way Home, where he teamed with Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland. And some of it might be because Spider-Man 3 usually ranks at the bottom of any list of every Spider-Man movie, ranked.
So, the fans have created a hashtag, #MakeRaimiSpiderMan4, and on November 24, they are going to do everything in their power to make it trend.
A new trending event!On November 24th, we will tweet #MakeRaimiSpiderMan4 and show Sony that the Raimi-verse will not be forgotten! The fans will never be silent! @SonyPictures @Sony pic.twitter.com/TFNgR2y7UNNovember 14, 2022
Trending events like this serve a distinct purpose. They’re meant to clue a studio, in this case Sony, into drawing power of a fandom and alert the executives to the fact that there’s interest in a movie that isn’t about to get made. In the case of the Snyder Cut, the Justice League fans were campaigning for a movie that basically was completed and needed some post-production work to finish it off.
When it comes to Spider-Man 4, though, you’d be asking a studio to fully commit to what’d likely be a $200 million movie, and one that doesn’t really fit into either the MCU narrative (working around Tom Holland) or the Sony-verse stories… which include Venom, Morbius, and the upcoming Kraven the Hunter and Madame Webb movies. Granted, that universe could use a Spider-Man. Why not make it Tobey?
The concept of Spider-Man 4 has been discussed by both Sony and Sam Raimi, though all parties involved are playing it diplomatically and saying, “You never know!” And we know why Spider-Man 4 didn’t happen back in the day, but things are very different now. And there’s a groundswell of support for Tobey Maguire as the Peter Parker that started it all. And a trending event on November 24 can only help keep the conversation going, especially if it succeeds.
