Sony Had 8 Spider-Man Movies Planned After ‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’, Here’s What Happened

Long before Sony built its Venom-and-friends franchise or handed the web-slinger over to Marvel Studios, the studio had a much bigger, much bolder plan already in motion. It centered entirely on Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker, and it looked nothing like the Spider-Man universe fans eventually got.

In the years following ‘The Amazing Spider-Man,’ Sony assembled what it called a creative “brain trust” to build connective tissue across a slate of Spidey-adjacent films, all feeding into and out of Garfield’s ongoing story. The goal was ambitious: turn Spider-Man’s world into the kind of interconnected franchise machine that superhero studios were just beginning to chase.

At the center of that plan were roughly eight separate projects in various stages of development, spanning direct sequels, villain team-ups, and character-driven spinoffs. It’s a lineup that, in hindsight, reveals just how much bigger Sony was thinking before everything came crashing down.

‘The Amazing Spider-Man 3’ was meant to directly continue Garfield’s arc as Peter Parker, with plans reportedly built around introducing Mary Jane and dealing with the fallout from Oscorp’s growing web of secrets. A fourth installment was intended to follow, positioned as the culmination point where several of Sony’s other spinoff threads would finally converge into one crossover event.

Neither film made it past the planning stage. Sony’s timeline shifted repeatedly as the studio prioritized its expanding slate of spinoffs, eventually pushing the third film back years before the entire sequence collapsed.

Beyond the core sequels, Sony was developing a villain-centric team-up called ‘Sinister Six,’ with Drew Goddard attached to write and direct a story built around some of Spider-Man’s most notorious rogues. A separate, darker spinoff focused on Eddie Brock and the Venom symbiote was also in the works, with Alex Kurtzman attached to direct what was then referred to internally as ‘Venom Carnage.’

Sony was also developing a female-led team-up project pulling from characters including Silver Sable, Black Cat, Spider-Woman, and Silk, alongside a separate solo film centered on Felicia Hardy, or Black Cat, that had Lisa Joy attached to write. Rounding out the slate was a planned Spider-Man 2099 film built around Miguel O’Hara, and a widely reported spinoff centered on a younger version of Aunt May, envisioned as a 1960s-set espionage story.

Taken together, the eight projects represented a version of the Spider-Man franchise built almost entirely around characters other than Peter Parker himself, years before that same strategy would eventually define Sony’s actual shared universe starting with ‘Venom’ in 2018.

‘The Amazing Spider-Man 2’ arriving to weak reviews and softer-than-expected box office numbers in 2014 became the turning point for the entire plan. Combined with the fallout from that year’s massive Sony cyberattack, which exposed internal studio documents detailing many of these unmade projects to the public, the pressure on the franchise’s future became impossible to ignore.

By November 2015, Sony had shelved the remaining spinoffs tied to Garfield’s version of the character, effectively ending the Amazing Spider-Man universe before most of it ever got in front of cameras. The studio instead struck a deal with Marvel Studios that same year, bringing Peter Parker into the MCU and setting the stage for Tom Holland’s take on the character.

It’s a fascinating footnote in Spider-Man history precisely because so much of it never saw daylight. Sony’s later Spider-Man Universe, built on movies like ‘Venom’ and ‘Kraven the Hunter,’ ended up echoing several ideas from this original, abandoned slate, just with different actors, different timelines, and years of hindsight standing between them.

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