Spider-Verse: Movie Spider-Men (!!!)

Spider-Verse is a currently running event in the Spider-Man comics that will involve every* Spider-Man we've ever met, including several Spider-Women and Spider-Girls (not to mention Scarlet Spiders and Spider-Hams and whatnot), and several brand-new versions. The premise is simple: there's a group of people trying to wipe out every Spider character across the multiverse, so all the Spider characters will team up to stop them. This is, of course, a massive event - multimedia even, since it will also feature in the Spider-Man Unlimited video game and the animated series Ultimate Spider-Man - and given the premise, it's only natural that it will add a few entries to this catalog.

*I say "every" because Marvel says "every", but there are a few that won't be showing up, such as Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield.


...at least, that's what my Spider-Verse boilerplate has been saying, but haha! The writers tricked us! Or maybe tricked Sony, I'm not sure. Either way...

Today's entry is the movie Spider-Men!

Of course, we'll never actually see them, but they were clearly referred to in Spider-Verse #2 (January 2015):

Spider-Man Blue is clearly referring to Tobey Maguire, who played Red Pollard in the 2003 horse-racing movie based on a true story, Seabiscuit. But more importantly, he also played Peter Parker/Spider-Man in Sony's Spider-Man (2002), Spider-Man 2 (2004), and Spider-Man 3 (2007).

And Spider-Man Black is talking about Andrew Garfield, who played Eduardo Saverin in The Social Network (2010), but also played Peter Parker/Spider-Man in The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) and The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014). Whether he'll continue in this role remains to be seen.

This is big news. The Spider-Verse writers have mentioned that there are eight Spider-Men they aren't able to use, and although it doesn't seem like anyone knows who the eight officially are, the top two always mentioned are Maguire and Garfield. (Other possible ones include Spider-Man: The New Animated Series, Spider-Man (CBS), Spectacular Spider-Man, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, Electric Company, and the Amalgam comics characters Spider-Boy, Spider-Boy 2099, and Unfriendly Neighborhood Spider-Clone #1. As you can see, that's more than eight; Spider-Boy has in fact appeared, although perhaps illegally, and Electric Company was listed in the examples of every Spider-Man ever appearing, so that one's probably ok.) But even though we'll never see them, we know they're out there, somewhere, fighting for the rest of the multiverse along with the rest of their spider-brethren.