New Spider-Man film will be like ‘a John Hughes movie,’ feature new villain: Marvel head

LOS ANGELES — New details about the upcoming Spider-Man reboot continue to emerge.

In addition to the recent casting news that Tom Holland will play Peter Parker, Marvel honcho Kevin Feige has revealed that the new film will explore Spider-Man in a firmly high-school setting.

“Spider-Man will be a ‘John Hughes’ movie,” Feige said in an interview with SlashFilm.

He added that Spidey’s age will set him apart from other Marvel characters. “Some of my favorite Spider-Man arcs and Spider-Man stories, he’s in high school for a lot of it. We want to explore that. That also makes him very, very different from any of our other characters in the MCU, which is something else we want to explore: how unique he is when now put against all these other characters.”

In an interview with Collider, Feige elaborated on the idea of pitting Parker against the other superheroes. Holland read against Robert Downey, Jr in a screen test, and reportedly held his own, which helped him clinch the part. “That was part of it,” Feige said. “When we’ll see that, I don’t know, but that was part of it.”

The Spidey reboot is likely to feature a comic-book villain who hasn’t been in any of the previous movies. “Right now we’re interested in seeing villains we haven’t seen before,” Feige told SlashFilm.

Feige also shared his rationale behind hiring Jon Watts to direct.

“We met with him four, five, or six times, and each time he had more and more interesting things to say,” Feige told Collider. “And at Marvel, it always comes down to ultimately, ‘We can make a movie with this person for two years, we could spend almost every day with this person for two years. Let’s go.’” VARIETY.COM/REUTERS