Aunt May - Sony Working on Spider-Man Spin-Off Based Around Young Aunt May

[Walts Ghost]

EXCLUSIVE: Sony's Now Working on a Spider-Man-Less Aunt May Movie

Here comes Trouble, and I might mean that literally.

It’s been obvious from the various and absolutely crazy rumors about upcoming Spider-Man movies that Sony is struggling to find a direction for the franchise and the crazier the rumors get the more it seems like they’d rather milk the property from every single angle rather than give the main character back to Marvel. What started as rumors of villain-centric series, The Sinister Six and Venom, has been transformed by the increasing chorus of disappointed sighs from Amazing Spider-Man 2 to Venom: Carnage and “a female lead Spider-Man movie” that might be a crazy movie codenamed Glass Ceiling that features female Spider-Man Universe characters that have never been team-up before in history, let alone on screen.

Now, it’s my solemn duty to put another wild Sony thrashing Spider-Movie on the pile of rumored Spider-Man movies. I was told by the Latino Review editorial brain-trust that this is completely true: Sony is pursuing an Aunt May movie.

Yes, an Aunt May movie. A movie about Aunt May as a youth, before she was shouldered with the responsibility of raising Peter Parker. The target mood is some sort of espionage story in the vein of AMC’s Mad Men, which sounds like a way of saying “classier Agent Carter” without name-dropping Marvel’s upcoming series.

But the whole point here is that I NOT mention Marvel, because Sony isn’t giving up the Spider-Verse before they make an attempt at a movie based on the completely fabricated past of May Parker. Well, the espionage part is fabricated.

Marvel, sorry for the name drop Sony, released a Mark Millar-penned romance mini-series in 2003 called Trouble that they thought would be the new origin of Spider-Man. It featured teenage versions of Aunt May, Uncle Ben, Richard and Mary Parker. Through a convoluted series of events, May gets teen-pregnant by Richard but gave up baby Peter to Mary who takes the secret of Peter’s true parentage to her grave.

Spider-Man fans were not happy and the story didn’t sell too well, so that was the end of any attempts to focus on young Aunt May and thereby Spider-Man’s origin reverted back to not-being-the-child-of-Aunt-May.

It seems odd that Sony would give this a try as a way to reboot Spider-Man like Trouble attempted, but using Aunt May as a Agent Peggy Carter replacement character might not have the emotional resonance that Carter has. I’d imagine it’s hard enough to make a successful period, female-lead, espionage thriller regardless of the main character’s future interactions with superheroes. I can’t imagine why Avi Arad and Matt Tolmach, keepers of the Spider-Franchise, think that this is easier than Amazing Spider-Man 3. They’d be the two in charge of this endeavor and it seems unnecessary at best and disastrous at worst.

But that’s what we hear is really happening: Aunt May movie.

Latino Review