As well as the complex legal and contractual issues that saw the rights bounce around various studios for close to two decades, the other major reason why it took Spider-Man so long to make his feature film debut was that the technology simply didn’t exist to have it be either convincing or worth the investment.
Having a dude on wires wouldn’t have worked for an entire movie, as anyone that’s seen the 1970s television efforts can attest, and as a result, Peter Parker’s live-action adventures have always tended to cost a pretty penny. Sam Raimi’s first installment was budgeted at $139 million, but just five years later, Spider-Man 3 became the most expensive production in history at $258 million.
The Amazing Spider-Man initially entered development as a smaller scale reboot that would set the studio back $90 million, but by the time shooting started, Sony were investing $230 million into Andrew Garfield’s debut. Somewhat surprisingly, the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Far From Home is the second cheapest web-slinging blockbuster ever made at $160 million, but insider Daniel Richtman now claims that the next outing for Tom Holland’s costumed crimefighter will be the biggest and most expansive one yet.
While he offers no further details, his intel does smack of the startlingly obvious. After all, the multiverse is going to play a big role in Spider-Man 3, and as the first live-action film to incorporate alternate realities and branching timelines, it instantly becomes the biggest and most expansive from a narrative standpoint by default.
Budget-wise, official figures haven’t been released yet, but the average price of an MCU movie tends to be around $200 million these days, so there’s every chance it could usurp Raimi’s trilogy-capper as the costliest Spidey story to date, especially if the rumored additions to the cast materialize.