New Spider-Man Writers Offer Details

John Francis Daley and Jonathan M. Goldstein, the writing duo being the Vaction sequel, recently confirmed being on board Spider-Man, and now offer the following on how it went down in addition to a few details.

Below you can check out the text (via Deadline), but worth pointing out is that the new Spider-Man will be:

• An action comedy similar to a John Hughes movie set throughout high school.

• They are approaching it from the standpoint Peter Parker/Spider-Man is a real kid, a high school geek who gets super powers he really doesn’t want, and he doesn’t become a super hero right away.

• Described as a “long journey” in that Spider-Man won’t be saving the whole world right away.

Our agent helped get our foot in the door with Marvel, sending them a script we had written, and letting them know our track record and that we’d love to move from broad comedy to action and action comedy. Also, it helped that Kevin Feige wanted to draw on the spirit of John Hughes for this Spider-Man, and we had just written and directed a sequel to a John Hughes-created franchise with Vacation. We’d pitched ourselves to both write and direct, and so our pitch included a pretty extensive story outline that appealed to them. After Jon Watts got the directing job, they came back and asked if we would be interested in doing the script. The answer was, yes.

Lot of specifics still have to be worked out, and we’ll be sitting with Jon Watts to figure it out, shortly. We definitely were attracted to approaching it from the standpoint of a real kid, a high school geek who, just because he gets super powers he doesn’t really want, doesn’t become a superhero right away.

It’s a long journey. You don’t want him to become someone capable of saving the world by second act. There is a wish fulfillment opportunity here in that few superheroes are given powers like this, and then has to navigate how to use them in a responsible way. Peter Parker is a geek, like us, and one of the very few superheroes who would actually read comic books. Stan Lee has said he wrote it that way, with wish fulfillment in mind, where most superheroes are very handsome adults, with superpowers. This is a real kid we’re talking about.

Spider-Man is speculated to be first appearing next May in Captain America: Civil War; the new standalone Spider-Man movie is due out July 28, 2017 directed by Jon Watts starring Tom Holland.