The boss of the Marvel Universe explains a little bit about the Spider-Man casting plans for their new movie.
The Marvel Cinematic Universe Spider-Man movie gets more real every single day. Marvel Universe architect and executive producer Kevin Feige has finally offered some info. Most of this just confirms what we already knew, but it's good to hear the Marvel honcho sound off on a few points.
First of all, it's definitely Peter Parker and not Miles Morales. That's probably no surprise. But they're definitely committed to keeping Spidey in high school. "In terms of the age of an actor we’ll eventually to cast, I don’t know. In terms of the age of what we believe Peter Parker is, I’d say 15-16 is right.”
Spidey seemed to get his powers around senior year in the earlier franchises, but in the comics he definitely seemed to be a bit younger than that, so this is a fairly accurate way to go about things.
Feige elaborated a little more about the importance of a young Peter Parker:
“We want to play with Spider-Man in the high school years because frankly there’ve been five Spider-Man films and the amazing thing about it is, even though there’ve been five Spider-Man films, there are so many things from the comics that haven’t been done yet. Not just characters or villains or supporting characters, but sides to his character. The most obvious being the ‘young, doesn’t quite fit in’ kid before his powers, and then the fella that puts on a mask and swings around and fights bad guys and doesn’t shut up, which is something we want to play with and we’re excited about.”
So, saying that a new Spider-Man movie is going to focus on "Peter Parker in high school" is kind of like putting "Sun Rises in East" in a headline, but it's that "and doesn't shut up" which is kind of exciting. They touched on this a little in The Amazing Spider-Man 2(one of the few things that movie got right). But it almost sounds like the new Spider-Man franchise won't be quite so intent on motoring through "big moments" in Spider-Man history, instead just letting the fun, drama, and strangeness of the character and his situation breathe.
Last we heard, Drew Goddard (Cabin in the Woods, Daredevil) was the leading candidate to write and direct the new Spider-Man movie.
You can get the whole interview with Kevin Feige over at Collider.
