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Spider-Man 4 was never really in doubt, and it looks like the phenomenally successful box office run of Spider-Man: No Way Home may be pushing Marvel Studios and Sony to bring Tom Holland’s web-slinger back to screens sooner rather than later. According to a new rumor shared by The Cosmic Circus, the collaborative fourth outing for Marvel’s golden boy is being eyed for a release in summer 2024. With so many Marvel movies releasing over the next few years, we will be seeing new outings for many of Marvel’s biggest heroes, but could an early return for Peter Parker lead to another slate change?
If this rumor turns out to be true, and Marvel and Sony are planning to slip Spider-Man 4 into a July 12, 2024 slot, that would mean there would only be two weeks between that movie and the previously announced Thunderbolts debut. This would also be just two months after the release of Captain America: New World Order on May 3, and would also be followed by Blade and Deadpool 3 in their new respective slots of September 6 and November 8. While that could be possible, it is unlikely that Marvel Studios would want to put out two movies within a fortnight of each other, especially when a Spider-Man 4 release just ahead of Thunderbolts would most likely negatively affect the latter release.
Will There Be More Marvel Date Changes Following Today’s Slate Shuffle?
Marvel Studios has just reworked their release schedule, with several movies, including Blade, Deadpool 3, Fantastic Four and Avengers: Secret Wars, all being delayed by between three and ten months. There are still a lot of dates penciled into Marvel’s calendar that do not have specific movies attached to them, and it will probably end up with Spider-Man 4 taking of these or Thunderbolts being pushed down the line.
When it comes down to it, Marvel Studios has a specific timeline for events in the MCU, and if Spider-Man 4’s storyline doesn’t fit into that narrative this early on, there could be some more discussion between them and Sony to go before anything is decided for certain. However, the one thing to take from all of this is that even if it turns out to just be a rumor, Spider-Man 4 is clearly in the minds of everyone, which is not surprising considering his movies are guaranteed to pull in huge numbers of audiences as was seen during the Covid pandemic when Spider-Man: No Way Home became one of the highest grossing movies of all time.
Tom Holland is already expected to play Peter Parker in a new trilogy of movies, which will begin with Spider-Man 4 and could see the character going off in an unexpected direction after the world forgot that Peter Parker is Spider-Man in the final moments of his last outing. There have been plenty of comments from Kevin Feige and others as to how important Tom Holland’s hero is to the MCU, and of course, in Spider-Man: No Way Home’s mid-credits scene, Tom Hardy’s Eddie Brock ended his short trip to the MCU by leaving a small amount of his symbiote self behind, hinting that a new version of Venom is also coming to the MCU in Spider-Man’s next outing. We can probably expect to hear more about this in the near future.