The three separate parties of Marvel, Disney, and Sony have confirmed that a 19-year-old British actor named Tom Holland will be playing the role Spider-Man, the iconic Marvel Superhero. Holland, who is most famous for roles in The Impossible and the TV miniseries Wolf Hall, will be playing Peter Parker in a film with a release date in two years.
For months, there were rumors about what direction the Spider-Man franchise was going to take, according to Variety. The studio couldn't decide if they wanted an unknown actor or some star with a more established name, not to mention someone who could play a teenager in the next few years. Names like Asa Butterfield, Charlie Rowe, and Matthew Lintz were thrown around, and were even flying them out to Atlanta to test with some of the actors that they would be starring with in Captain America: Civil War.
The third Captain America movie is due out on May 6, 2016, and Civil War will be the first time that Spider-Man will appear as part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe established in such film series such as The Avengers, Iron Man, and Thor. Since Sony studios own the rights to the Marvel comics character, a special deal was made with Marvel and Disney to bring in the web-slinger.
The Spider-Man movies have been down many roads. With the first Spider-Man movie appearing in 2002 being a hit with Tobey Maguire, then an even bigger hit with Spider-Man 2 in 2004. Unfortunately, there was a lot of negative reviews of Spider-Man 3 in 2007, and it was unknown whether the director of the first three films, Sam Raimi, would be back for a Spider-Man 4.
In order to keep the rights to the franchise, Sony was contractually obligated to produce another Spider-Man film, and they decided to reboot it with The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012 with Andrew Garfield in the lead. The film was enough to get a sequel, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014), but this was a critical and commercial failure. There were plans to do a movie based on the Sinister Six, a group of Spider-Man villains, but these plans have since fell through, along with plans for an Amazing Spider-Man 3.
As for the new solo Spider-Man movie, it will be directed by Jon Watts, best known for the film Cop Car. It will hit theaters on July 28, 2017. According to Yahoo Movies, the solo film will focus on Peter Parker's high-school roots, but will not redo the origin story that was done before in the other two film series. According to imdb, this is simply called the Untitled Spider-Man Reboot, but it could easily have a title like Spectacular Spider-Man, Web of Spider-Man, or any of the other titles used for Spider-Man comics since 1962.
