True Story Of The 8 Best Spider-Man Movies Never Made
2. 2007 Onwards - Silver & Black, Venom, And Sinister Six Spin-Offs
One of the benefits of owning the rights to a popular comic-book character is that you also get the rights to that character's expanded universe of heroes and villains. This is the position that Sony has been in for the last two decades, and over the years, they've made numerous attempts to cinematically exploit Spidey's roster of side characters.
The reason we've placed this entry after The Amazing Spider-Man 3 is that a lot of these spin-offs would've been offshoots of that franchise, but before we get into those, we should mention the fact that Topher Grace almost got his own Venom solo movie off the back of Raimi's Spider-Man 3.
The existence of this project was revealed in 2007, and a full year later, THR reported that Sony was still moving forward with it. Reportedly, the studio wanted Venom to be to Spider-Man what Wolverine was to Fox's X-Men movies, and even though they weren't confident that Grace could carry a blockbuster, he was still up for the title role.
Sure, this movie could've sucked, but it did have potential: one draft of the script featured a sequence where the symbiote traveled through a city, jumping between humans, turning them violent and causing them to lash out at those around them.
Now that sounds awesome.
When Raimi's Spider-Man 4 was cancelled, Venom fell by the wayside, but when The Amazing Spider-Man took off, Sony's appetite for spin-offs reared its head once again.
In December 2013, the studio announced that it was pursuing spin-offs based on Venom (again) and The Sinister Six, intended to expand The Amazing Spider-Man franchise into a cinematic universe. Then, in 2014, a "female superhero movie" - later revealed as Silver & Black - was outed, which would join that same universe.
Sinister Six would've reportedly been a redemption story, possibly turning the villainous group into anti-heroes. Drew Goddard was attached to write and direct, and if you've seen Bad Times at the El Royale, you know this man can build an engaging ensemble piece about a group of bad people. Silver & Black, meanwhile, had Thor: Ragnarok screenwriter Chris Yost involved, which is good news for any project.
But when The Amazing Spider-Man franchise crashed and burned, these spin-offs went down with the ship. Technically though, Silver & Black and Sinister Six have never been officially cancelled (the former was instead split into two films), but if and when they do get made, they'll be vastly different from the way they were originally pitched.