Stop us if you’ve heard this one before, but once upon a time Sony was rapidly developing a number of Spider-Man spin-offs outside of the Marvel Cinematic Universe to play Kevin Feige at his own game, only for those plans to fall apart in short order when it became increasingly clear the studio had no idea what it was doing.
Are we talking about the current iteration of Sony’s Spider-Man Universe, or those plans from a decade ago that had The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and 4 handed release dates while Drew Goddard’s Sinister Six, Silver & Black, an early version of Venom, and countless more entered active development? Realistically it could be either, but in this case we’re talking about the latter.
There’s no denying Goddard’s talents when the Academy Award-nominated writer and filmmaker has Cloverfield, The Cabin in the Woods, The Martian, the first season of Netflix’s Daredevil, and Bad Times at the El Royale on his resume, but new book MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios offered a terrifying glimpse of what Sony could have had in store when it offered details on a Sinister Six draft.
“By the end of 2014, [Drew Goddard] had a draft that took Spider-Man and his villains to the Savage Land, where Spider-Man would ride a T-Rex.”
Look, we’re not denying that watching Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker riding a goddamned tyrannosaurus wouldn’t be a sight to see, but it also sounds utterly preposterous and ridiculous in all the wrong ways. The MCU’s web-slinger might have been to outer space, but you can’t imagine him hitching a lift on a dinosaur. If that’s what Sony was planning then, we can only shudder at what’s being cooked up now.