With Tom Holland in the oddly-smooth Spidey suit, this iteration of the iconic web-slinger is proving to be quite popular. In fact, Spider-Man: Far From Home is out this week, but the wall-crawler took quite some time to get to the point where he could take on Mysterio, the fish-bowl wearing special effects artist/evil mastermind. The original cinematic Spider-Man and his director, Sam Raimi, were almost ready to do just that in 2010 though, but then the movie was cancelled. What was this abandoned film to be about, though?
Well, according to a deep dive on the dead Sony franchise, done by the folks over at Screen Rant, Tobey McGuire’s web-head was to take on a combination of Mysterio, the Vulture (John Malkovich) and the Vultress (Anne Hathaway), who would change into Black Cat. Peter Parker and MJ would reconcile their relationship and mourn the loss of Harry Osborne. There’s also rumblings that The Lizard (Dylan Baker) would either maybe cameo in this, or be heavily alluded to as to be in Spider-Man 5 (or even 6).
My favorite part of the whole idea is that Bruce Campbell, who’d cameoed in the previous three films in minor comedic parts, would be revealed to be Mysterio. Sure, he would’ve been the cold open of the movie, with Spider-Man dispatching him thusly and tossing him out of the pic basically, but god damn that would’ve been so fucking cool. Anything with more Bruce Campbell in it would be cooler.
But alas, Sam Raimi didn’t have enough time to shoot the film. Sony pushed for a May 2011 release, and Raimi couldn’t make all the story threads come together successfully, so the project was shut down. The Evil Dead director would be game for a different Marvel movie these days, however, so let the auteur take a stab at, I dunno, Jubilee or some lame X-Person. Or cast Bruce Campbell as the next Nick Fury?
In the meantime, we can see how this new Mysterio fares in Spider-Man: Far From Home over the most patriotic of all weekends.