The Future For Marvel’s Spider-Man

The verdict is in and Marvel Studios’ first attempt at a Spider-Man movie is a big success. Spider-Man: Homecoming has gotten some of the best reviews of any superhero movie this century and it destroyed the box office in its opening weekend. It’s a blockbuster and there’s no other word for it. The question now becomes what Marvel does with its new web-slinging hero.

For starters, a sequel would appear to be in order. We won’t spoil any details, but suffice it to say the end of Spider-Man: Homecoming indicated a follow-up and not just in the form of collaborative Avengers projects to come. Yes, this new Spidey is affiliated with The Avengers, and in some ways is a direct protégé for Tony Stark (Robert Downey, Jr.), but he also has his own journey to follow. Then again, we didn’t really need Homecoming to tell us this. Tom Holland, the wonderful young actor who now plays the part of Peter Parker, has personally confirmed a trilogy.

It’s also conceivable that this success will lead to some more Spider-Man video games. New versions of Spider-Man have already appeared in some mobile games in connection to the film release and a new Spider-Man PS4 game is in the works. Marvel has even more other games in the works as well. The company has licensing agreements allowing for plenty of movie-inspired titles among Playtech’s online slot arcades. And beyond these regularly released titles, Marvel has also vowed to intensify its focus on the console market. We wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the Tom Holland version of Spider-Man appear in places like these, either in a new themed slot or in a future console experience.

Maybe most exciting will be the character’s involvement in some of the aforementioned collaborative Avengers projects. There’s never really any telling which Marvel characters will pop up in which movies so it’ll be fun to guess where we might see Spider-Man next. But it’s a virtual certainty that he’ll at least appear in Avengers: Infinity War when it comes out in 2018. And given the immediate popularity of Holland and the Homecoming film itself, he’ll probably get a big role. One can argue that the most impressive aspect of the Marvel Cinematic Universe is the directors’ ability to involve multiple “main” heroes in these projects so it shouldn’t be any trouble to give Holland a big part.

And then there’s the man himself. Tom Holland is not just a fresh face with a lucky opportunity to wear comic book fans’ favorite suit. He’s a very capable and hard-working actor who burst onto the scene with an excellent performance in The Impossible and earned the respect of legions of fans with his intensive training for Spider-Man. Holland is the real deal and it will be just as exciting to see what happens with him as with his character.

All things considered, this may be one of the more important Marvel projects to date and the future looks very bright for the everyone’s favorite wall-crawler.