Andrew Garfield is the talk of the town right now. If it isn’t for his role as Jonathan Larson in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut tick, tick…BOOM! then it is for his work in The Eyes of Tammy Faye as Jim Bakker—or, I guess, you know, Spider-Man: No Way Home. As many of us know, Garfield spent the better part of two years lying about his involvement in Tom Holland’s third Spider-Man film, so now that we all know we were being lied to, we are taking everything that happened with a grain of salt.
But, according to Garfield, he doesn’t have any plans to put on Spidey’s suit again any time soon. “No plans, that’s the truth,” Garfield told Variety at the 28th annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. “Everyone’s gonna call me a liar for the rest of my life. I’m the boy who cried wolf.”
He’s right about that. He is the boy who cried wolf after relentless Spider-Man questions on his press tours, but I don’t think any of us blame him. It’s not like he could have ruined the surprise for everyone in an interview and been fine with it. But now it does mean that everything he says about Spider-Man has us looking at him with a sideways glance.
Asking whether he’ll ever make a return as the webslinger isn’t an outrageous question anymore, now that we know his version of Spider-Man exists in the multiverse. It could easily mean we see him in his own Spider-verse again, and with how Sony has been doing their own villain movies, could we head there with Garfield’s Peter Parker?
The Sony-Verse
When Tom Hardy’s Venom happened, everyone was a bit confused about where it fit in the Spider-Man universe. We’re still confused even after a sequel, not to mention the upcoming Morbius movie and another about Kraven the Hunter. Thus far, it hasn’t been clear what Spider-Man these villains are up against, if any, and for the most part, Morbius is really the first time we see any sort of inclusion of Spidey in the storyline. (Yes, we know Venom knows who Spider-Man is, but that’s not the point.)
All of this is to say that if they needed a Peter Parker and couldn’t use Tom Holland’s version of the character, maybe a benefit of the inclusion of both Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield in No Way Home was that the actors could be used when Spider-Man is needed in the Sony-verse more freely. I think that Sony should be trying to figure out how to include Miles Morales in their universe, but maybe one of these Peter Parkers are from Miles’ world.
There’s a lot in the air with the future of Spider-Man. We don’t know where it’s going next, who will be involved, or who Spider-Man is going to be up against. But at least we know that we now have to take everything that Andrew Garfield says with a bit of a side-eye and disbelief. Personally? I’d love it if he came back in the Sony-Verse, but I’d also love more if they let his Spider-Man give the mantle over to Miles Morales.
For now, we’ll just have to wait and see what Sony and Marvel has in store for us.
(images: Sony Pictures)
