Director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy, which starred Tobey Maguire as the wall-crawler, had a fourth film planned, however we got the re-boot instead with Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man five years after Spider-Man 3. Work on the fourth film had progressed, though, and we can now see what might have been, thanks to storyboards released by artist Jeffrey Henderson.
From what we can tell, it certainly looks like it could have been a spectacular movie.
The storyboards reveal the movie’s villains as the Vulture and Mysterio, though Henderson told io9 that the latter villain was floated as Bruce Campbell’s cameo–Campbell and Raimi worked together on The Evil Dead (1981), and Campbell made a cameo appearance in each of the three Spider-Man movies. Henderson said that it would have been a part of a montage at the beginning of the film, which would show Spider-Man dealing with “C and D-list villains” like the Shocker, Prowler, and “the old school, onesie-wearing Rhino.”
The Vulture would go on to be Spider-Man 4‘s main villain, though Henderson said Raimi had some ideas to reinvent and modernize the character.
“The thing we kept coming back to was that, as a character, everyone was going to dismiss the Vulture as just an old guy in a silly green suit,” Henderson explained. “So we wanted to go the opposite way and really make him the most fearsome and formidable adversary that Spider-Man had faced in the series.”
Alas, Spider-Man 4 was not to be, and we unfortunately don’t know why it was cancelled. The only way to see Spider-Man in theaters these days is in Captain America: Civil War and the upcoming Spider-Man: Homecoming, which releases in summer 2017.