Even with The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperforming, Sony is clutching tightly to the license it got from Marvel, and now news emerges that the studio might be planning an all-female spinoff movie with some of the femme fatales from the Spider-Man comics.
Rumor has it that Sony is trying to breathe new life into its Spider-Man franchise, and that new life might come in the form of a crew of Spider-Man-affiliated women. According to BadAssDigest , the project has a tentative title of Glass Ceiling, and it’s supposed to draw on the superpowered women in Peter Parker’s life.
Sony already has a couple of other Spider-Man spinoffs in the works, those being a Sinister Six movie hinted at in The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and a Venom or Carnage flick. The former would likely be a Dirty Dozen-style film focused on the exploits of six Spider-Man villains, while the latter would focus on one or two anti-heroes from the Spider-Man mythology.
If the Glass Ceiling project were to materialize, it would mark the third major superhero movie announcement with a woman in the lead, following the Warner Bros. announcement of a forthcoming Wonder Woman solo picture and Marvel’s unveiling of a Captain Marvel flick .
Just which characters would an all-female Spider-Man spinoff focus on, though? That’s something of a conundrum. There are a number of woman characters from the Spider-Man comics, but it remains to be seen whether any one of them – or any combination of them – would bring enough newness to the table to merit a feature film.
Felicia Hardy, the Black Cat, is an option, but the character’s similarity to DC’s already established Catwoman makes her a bit problematic. Silver Sable is a mercenary who has appeared many times in Spider-Man stories, but she brings little of interest aside from a knack for guns. There is also a Spider-Girl character, but she could well be too derivative, at least in name, to merit placement.
Silk is one of the newest characters added to Marvel’s Spider-Man lore.
Marvel in recent months appears to have been trying to help Sony out on the Spider-Man front. Reportedly, Marvel’s licensing deal with Sony has much better terms than does its X-Men/Fantastic Four deal with Fox. Because of that, Marvel hasn’t been introducing new X-Men characters, but new Spider-Man characters have been popping up recently, and those might play very well into Glass Ceiling.
The newest Spider-Man characters to pop up are, in fact, women, and they’ve generated a good deal of buzz since their unveiling. The first is an alternate universe version of Gwen Stacy. In that universe, Gwen – not Peter Parker – was the one bitten by the radioactive spider and granted spider powers. The character proved so popular upon its debut that Marvel is now giving “Spider-Gwen” her own series.
The other character is Silk, a mainline Marvel Universe character who was revealed to have been bitten by the same spider that bit Peter Parker. Throw in some retroactive continuity tweaking and blah blah blah comic book silliness and there’s now a cool looking female Spider-Hero kicking much butt alongside Spider-Man.
If Sony is rolling out an all-female Spider-Man movie, it might still struggle to stand out when it comes to the screen. That’s because the years 2015 through 2020 are going to see an abundance of superhero movie fare, with more than two dozen Marvel, DC, Fox, and Sony superhero pictures slated for release.