Last year, I made an essay topic about why I felt worried about Spider-Man: No Way Home. The thoughts I expressed seemed to be received fairly well, though my worries were more or less proven for nought when the movie came out.
But after the movie came out, it was confirmed that they were developing a fourth Spider-Man movie, with the hope that Tom Holland would return. The idea of it sounded promising. NWH ended with Peter Parker completely on his own-no backing from Stark Industries, no Aunt May, and no Ned or MJ. Where could they possibly go from there?
Unfortunately, we might not get answers for a little while longer. Marvel announced their full slate for Phases 4, 5, and 6 recently, and it confirmed the release dates for Blade, The Marvels, Guardians Of The Galaxy 3, Captain America 4, and others-but I didn’t see any Spider-Man in there. Even more worrying is that around the time NWH came out, Tom Holland made some comments saying that he might not want to play Spider-Man again. He said that he felt like he’d be doing something wrong if he was still playing Spider-Man when he was 30.
There definitely is some truth to that. If Marvel wants to keep Spider-Man as a high-school-aged superhero for the rest of his time in the MCU, then it would definitely feel wrong if Tom Holland was still playing the character when he was 30. How many times have people made fun of Hollywood casting 25-30-year-old actors as teenaged characters? On the other hand, there was a rumor circulating a while back that Marvel wanted three Spider-Man trilogies-one about him in high school (which has now been completed), one about him in college, and one about him as an adult. I haven’t read the Spider-Man comics, but I’ve been told that the really good Spider-Man stories come when he’s out of high school and living the adult life. So a 30-year-old Tom Holland Spider-Man might not be such a bad thing.
Oh, and there’s also gonna be a Spider-Man: Freshman Year animated series on Disney+. When I first heard about it, I thought it sounded interesting, but then leaks confirmed that it would feature characters such as Green Goblin and Dock Ock that appeared in NWH (as alternate reality forms, no less) and I was confused. Then the series was confirmed to be an alternate reality in the vein of What If…?, so…there goes the prequel status, I guess.
Whatever the case, it does appear that Spider-Man will continues in future MCU phases. And until we get more details, all we can do is speculate.