Tom Holland Officially Makes Spider-Man History With Marvel Milestone
On July 31, we’ll finally get to see Spider-Man: Brand New Day. Picking up four years after the events of No Way Home, and hitting theaters nearly five years after its release, Brand New Day is going back to Peter Parker’s comic-book roots with a grounded, street-level storyline about a friendly neighborhood webslinger fighting crime in New York City. He’ll team up with the Punisher, he’ll fight the Hand, and he’ll both team up with and fight the Hulk. I can’t remember the last time I was this excited about a Marvel movie.
Tom Holland is making history with his latest Spidey adventure. Brand New Day will make Holland the first Spider-Man actor to star in four solo movies. Tobey Maguire starred in three, then Andrew Garfield only made two, and Shameik Moore’s Miles Morales is set to conclude his story with the upcoming third installment in the trilogy, Spider-Man: Beyond the Spider-Verse. So, Holland will be the first to graduate to a fourth solo film.
He already topped Maguire and Garfield for most Spider-Man movie appearances way back in 2019, when he played Peter for the fourth time in Avengers: Endgame. Since then, Holland has made two more solo Spidey movies (the second of which actually brought back Maguire and Garfield, bumping up their total appearances by one) and cameoed in Venom: Let There Be Carnage. But Brand New Day will make him the first Spider-Man actor to star in a fourth solo film.
Maguire was supposed to have a fourth movie, and a fifth and a sixth after that. Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man 4 even had a release date lined up after the success of Spider-Man 3. But the project ended up getting cancelled and retooled as The Amazing Spider-Man, a fresh reboot with a new actor, so what happened?
Why Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man 4 Was Cancelled
In 2007, after Spider-Man 3 became a blockbuster success at the box office (despite its mixed reviews), Sony officially greenlit Spider-Man 4 with a release date of May 6, 2011. Raimi was attached to direct, and Maguire, Kirsten Dunst, and other key cast members were signed on to reprise their roles in the next sequel. Spider-Man 4 was supposed to set up a new trilogy, with Spider-Man 5 and Spider-Man 6 to follow, and there was even talk of shooting the fourth and fifth movies simultaneously, but that plan was soon abandoned.
Spider-Man 3 had a famously troubled production, with creative differences between Raimi and the studio leading to an overstuffed plot and a terrible adaptation of Venom. Raimi hoped that Spider-Man 4 would steer the ship back in the right direction, and provide a more satisfying conclusion to the saga than Spider-Man 3.
James Vanderbilt wrote a script that was rewritten by David Lindsay-Abaire, which was rewritten again by Gary Ross — clearly, no matter how they tried to spin it, it just wasn’t working. Spider-Man 4 went through four different versions of a script, with various different screenwriters, but Raimi wasn’t satisfied with any of them. In 2010, Raimi pulled out of directing Spider-Man 4 because he didn’t think he could make a good movie in time for the May 2011 release date, and he returned to the horror genre to direct Drag Me to Hell instead.
Sony scrapped Spider-Man 4 and retooled the project as a total reboot, retelling Spidey’s origin story with a new actor in the role. So, Garfield was cast, and instead of releasing Spider-Man 4 in 2011, Sony released The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012. Now, a decade-and-a-half later, Holland is becoming the first Spidey to get a fourth movie with Spider-Man: Brand New Day.