The big screen world of Spider-Man just got a little bit bigger! It was announced at CinemaCon 2022, during the Sony panel, that Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio (known professionally as Bad Bunny) will bring Spider-Man-adjacent hero El Muerto to life at the movies. Bad Bunny seems to be taking this to heart, as he talked about loving wresting growing up and getting to play the character’s live-action incarnation.
“To bring El Muerto to life is just incredible .. so exciting,” he said and added his love of wrestling, which ties into the mask that gives El Muerto his powers. The character comes from a long line of wrestlers who wore mystical masks to give them powers, which leads to El Muerto taking on Spider-Man in a wrestling match and nearly winning.
The problem is that we don’t know a lot about El Muerto. He’s not a huge character in the comics, and he’s relatively new (first seen in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man Vol 1. #6 in 2006), so the movie could quite literally take the character anywhere.
A little about El Muerto
Adapting this character will be interesting, to say the least, because El Muerto doesn’t exactly have a huge history or a backstory to go off of. The powers of El Muerto’s mask were passed down through his family, with the ritual involving years of training and a fight with El Dorado. What’s interesting about the current El Muerto (also known as Juan-Carlos Estrada Sanchez) is that, when he was first presented to El Dorado by his father, he refused to fight, and El Dorado took pity on him (after his father sacrificed himself to protect his son). Juan-Carlos was given ten years to find his bravery to come back to prove himself once more.
That’s how he ended up challenging Spider-Man to a wrestling match for charity, with J. Jonah Jameson, and nearly unmasking Spidey until he was struck by Spider-Man’s paralyzing stingers and left in a hospital. Spider-Man went to rescue him and the two took on El Dorado together.
So what’s going to be interesting is that El Muerto’s story is greatly connected to Spider-Man as a character, and so far, we haven’t seen Spider-Man at all in the Sony-verse of Spider-Man spinoff characters. That may change with things like the upcoming Kraven the Hunter movie, but currently, there’s no Peter Parker or Spider-Man for the Sony movies, while Tom Holland’s version of the character hangs out in the Marvel Cinematic Universe instead.
How that will work for a character like Juan-Carlos Estrada Sanchez we’ll have to wait and see. It wouldn’t be the first time Sony has done a Spider-Man-free adaptation a character that is so intricately tied to Spidey in the comics. But seeing how excited Bad Bunny is about playing El Muerto is worth all the unknowns we currently have about the movie. It is on the Sony slate for an early 2024 release, and I can’t wait to see what El Muerto has in store for us.
(image: Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for MRC)
