Once upon a time — before Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone, and long before Spidey traded punches with the Avengers — Sam Raimi was actually going to make a Spider-Man 4 for Sony. Like most viewers who saw Spider-Man 3, Raimi was disappointed in the final product, having had a character he doesn’t care about in the form of Venom forced on him by the studio. But Raimi didn’t want to go out like that, and wanted to end his wall-crawling legacy with a good film that he had his heart invested in as much as Spider-Man 1 and 2. And it came this close to happening.
Despite not being loved by fans, Spider-Man 3 did make money at the box office, quite a bit in fact. So the studio decided to give Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire, and Kirsten Dunst another shot for Spider-Man 4 around 2009/2010. Pre-production began, and storyboards were drawn up. Raimi, who was always way more of a fan of classic Stan Lee/Steve Ditko era Spidey stories, decided that his two villains were going to Mysterio and the Vulture. Ultimately, Sony decided that it was in their best interest to reboot the series rather than have another Raimi installment.But now, some storyboards have turned up from Spider-Man 4, giving fans an idea of just what Mysterio and the Vulture would have looked like, and it turns out, they would have looked pretty darn close to their comic book counterparts. Illustrator Jeffrey Henderson has posted some of the storyboards for what both characters would have looked like on his blog. He also had this to say about the would have been final Raimi Spidey film:
“It would’ve been one absolutely kick ass movie. Seriously. We were working on some crazy-cool stuff, because everyone, from top to bottom, felt that Spidey 3 was a bit of a ‘missed opportunity’, and we all really wanted to help Sam take SM4 to another level so he could end the series on a high note.”
Unfortunately, we’ll never see that Spider-Man 4 come to life, but we can at least see what the two main villains would have looked like. And who knows? Maybe the Vulture –rumored to be played by Michael Keaton in Spider-Man: Homecoming — might looks something like how Raimi and Henderson envisioned him. You can see some of the storyboard art for the Vulture and Mysterio in our gallery below, and for the rest be sure to check out Brian Henderson’s website.
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Images: Sony Pictures/Jeffrey Henderson
