Up until recently, the most illusively enticing thing about newly discovered, long-lost, unmade movie scripts was that we would never get to see them on the big screen. Instead, fans were encouraged to dream of their own adaptations, based only on minuscule, nebulous glimpses of the detritus of Hollywood’s best laid, unfinished plans.
But these days we have the Multiverse! Which means that if there is a decent script out there that never got made, all it takes is a few swishes of the magic Marvel quantum wand, and entire realities can be brought back from purgatory. After all, if the studio can half-inch Hugh Jackman’s Wolverine and Patrick Stewart’s Professor X from 20th Century Fox’s X-Men movies, and bring back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parkers from the Sony Spider-Man movies, they can really do just about anything else they want to.
All of which brings us to, and forgive me if you’ve not heard this one in a while … Drew Goddard’s Sinister Six movie. Back in 2011, Goddard was all the rage after directing the excellent meta-horror romp Cabin in the Woods, and there have been more than a few mutterings in the geekosphere to the effect that his script for the supervillain epic (which had been intended to star Garfield) might easily be smartly repurposed for the incoming Tom Holland in the then-new Marvel-led Spider-Man films.
It never happened, but several of the baddies we might have expected to manifest in Sinister Six – Willem Dafoe’s Green Goblin, Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, Rhys Ifans’ Lizard and Thomas Haden Church’s Sandman (as well as Tom Hardy’s Venom in a post-credit scene) – did turn up in the splendid Spider-Man: No Way Home. In many ways that episode seemed to have rather put the kibosh on any suggestion that Goddard’s script might one day see the light of day, as it put such a neat curveball on the concept as to make the idea of doing the Sinister Six in a far more orthodox way redundant.
But this was before we found out that Goddard’s script featured Spider-Man romping through the Savage Land on a T rex. According to a newly released book, MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios, Marvel’s infamous take on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Lost World, which has been a staple of the comics since 1941, was due to be the setting of Spidey’s epic battle with the bad guys. It was originally conceived as the follow-up to 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, featuring Garfield as the masked wall-crawler, but abandoned when that movie tanked at the box office. There are suggestions that the villainous ensemble would have comprised Doctor Octopus, The Vulture, Sandman, Mysterio, The Black Cat, and perhaps even Spider-Man himself.
According to the book: “The goal was to have all of these villains team up for a Sinister Six film. The studio even had screenwriter Drew Goddard work up a draft. By the end of 2014, [Goddard] had a draft that took Spider-Man and his villains to the Savage Land … where Spider-Man would ride a T rex.”
Goddard has long said he planned to make Sinister Six a full-scale Spider-Man movie, rather than a supervillain flick along the lines of DC’s Suicide Squad, so it makes total sense that the webslinger would have played a central part. But not much more information is known about the movie, and the idea of Spidey riding a dinosaur will inevitably draw comparisons with the infamous Hollywood super-producer Jon Peters’ obsession with shoehorning a giant mechanical spider into one of his films, a feat finally achieved in the Will Smith bomb Wild Wild West. But is it really such a bad idea, especially if the wall-crawler in question was a returning Garfield, perhaps once again teaming up with his fellow Spider-Men to take down the baddies in the most exotic location in the Marvel sphere?
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After all, the studio needs some way to up the ante after Parker literally cracked a hole in the Multiverse last time out. Maybe superheroes cavorting with ape-men, cat-people and prehistoric beasts against a tropical backdrop hidden in the depths of Antarctica is quite simply the next spider-level we all need to be reaching right now.
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