Over the past few months, there have been rumblings on multiple social media platforms about the possible introduction of the Spider-verse in the MCU. While rumours and speculations still persisted, recent decisions and reports coming from the Marvel camp have lead us to believe that this is actually happening. But let’s break it down step-by-step.
1. What is the Spider-verse?
The Spider-verse is a comic book plot line created by Marvel comics which involved multiple Spider-men from various forms of media to band together against a common threat. In the comics, the Spider-men came together to fight one of their biggest inter-dimensional foes – Morlun and his family, The Inheritors.
2. Why is Marvel Studios taking on the Spider-verse plotline?
Marvel has never shied away from taking inspiration from their comics when they wanted to write story arcs for their characters in the MCU movies. Some good examples for this are The Civil War storyline, The Ultron Arc and of course, The Infinity War plot. Although these aforementioned movie plots differed from their comicbook counterparts, Marvel Studios managed to seamlessly incorporate these stories with ease. So it makes sense, that Marvel wanted to tackle one of their more well known Spider-man plotlines, especially after the success of the animated movie, ‘Spider-man: Into The Spider-verse’.
3. How does Marvel plan to incorporate the Spider-verse within the MCU?
Well this part is quite easy to answer due to the amount of overwhelming evidence. But the amount of proof backing the Spider-verse is too much to mention, hence we will discuss the most important ones.
Alfred Molina, Jamie Foxx and Willem Dafoe, who portrayed the villains Doc Oc, Electro and The Green Goblin respectively have all signed up to be a part of ‘Spider-man: Far from home’. The original Spider-men – Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield will return to play the “web-slingers” again, in the aforementioned movie. Normally, this alone should be good enough proof.
Recently, the VFX teams from both the previous Sony Spider-men movies have admitted to joining with Marvel’s VFX team. This will help the audience in differentiating the three different Spider-men while maintaining the natural feel for all Spider-men involved.
Lastly, and most importantly, Benedict Cumberbatch will be coming on board to portray Doctor Stephen Strange in the upcoming Spider-man movie. Dr. Stephen Strange is one of the few people in the MCU who can travel between dimensions, so his introduction in this film is not very surprising.
4. How will this affect the MCU?
If the Spider-verse plotline follows the storyline of the comics, we could be looking at a group of villains who could rival Thanos in power (without the Infinity stones) – The Totem-hunting Inheritors. Even if that doesn’t happen, Interdimensional travel allows a way for Marvel to incorporate Fox Studios’ ‘X-Men’, ‘Fantastic 4’ and ‘Deadpool’.
Many would call this speculation, but if you have followed the news reports like we have and checked our previous articles, you would have known that this was always a possibility. With the VFX team from Raimi’s and Webb’s films now confirmed to have joined ‘Spider-man: No Way Home’, we are definitely looking at the introduction of the Spider-verse in the MCU