Warning: Spoilers for Spider-Man: Brand New Day
As Spider-Man: Brand New Day continues to break records at the global box office, much speculation surrounds when the friendly neighborhood web-slinger will appear again on the big screen. The film concludes with on-screen text reading: “Spider-Man Will Return.” But, unlike teases at the end of Thunderbolts* and The Fantastic Four: First Steps that confirmed the Marvel heroes’ upcoming appearances in Avengers: Doomsday, when and how Spider-Man will pop up in live-action again remains unknown.
The widely discussed post-credits scene in director Destin Daniel Cretton’s film has only further raised questions about Spider-Man‘s potential role in the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s behemoth crossover event this December. The scene in question depicts Ned Leeds’ Spidey-Tracker app as Spider-Man symbols appear all over the New York City area. However, one symbol, indicating a spotting of Spider-Man, begins to drift outside of New York City, outside the United States, and eventually beyond Earth and into space.
While some have posited this post-credits scene indicates that Tom Holland’s Peter Parker finds himself on another planet, possibly Battleworld, sometime after the events of Brand New Day, another theory suggests that the symbol may not be an indicator of Tom Holland’s Spidey, but, rather, an entirely different, multiversal variant of the iconic Marvel hero appearing in Avengers: Doomsday.
No Way Home And Into The Spider-Verse Laid The Groundwork For A Multiverse Spider-Man
The notion of a multiversal variant of Spider-Man playing a role in an Avengers movie isn’t nearly as outlandish as it would have been 10 years ago. In the last eight years, Spider-Man has broken beyond street-level squabbles with crime lords and New York City-based scientists-gone-rogue by interacting with characters, including versions of himself, from entirely different universes.
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse made audiences accustomed to seeing more than one version of Spider-Man on the big screen in an Academy Award-winning film that featured Spider-Gwen, Spider-Noir, Spider-Ham, Peter B. Parker, and plenty of other Spider-Man variants. The immense popularity and acclaim of the Sony animated film indicated that Spider-Man can exist in massive multiversal sci-fi epics just as well as he can exist in localized, street-level stories.
Spider-Man: No Way Home proved this was the case in live-action when Tom Holland’s Peter Parker collaborated with variants played by Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. To date still the highest grossing Spider-Man movie of all time, director Jon Watts’ movie brought Maguire and Garfield into the Marvel Cinematic Universe for the first time, demonstrating that both actors are more than willing to don the red and blue bodysuit should the story feel like a good fit.
No Way Home also normalized the idea of seeing multiple live-action Spider-Man on the big screen at once. Such a concept had been achieved in Into the Spider-Verse, but doing so in live-action was another feat – one that Kevin Feige and the creative team knocked out of the park.
Narratively, Into the Spider-Verse and No Way Home blew the door wide open on the multiverse and set the stage for Spider-Man variants from universes other than Earth-616 appearing in Avengers: Doomsday.
Universes Collide In Avengers: Doomsday So Tobey Maguire Or Andrew Garfield Could Return
Avengers: Doomsday will follow in the footsteps of Loki, Spider-Man: No Way Home, and Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness by positioning the multiverse at the center of its story. Kevin Feige and the Russo brothers have discussed how the new film will see characters from at least three universes – the Fox X-Men universe, the MCU’s Earth-616, and the Fantastic Four’s universe – collide in an effort to stop Robert Downey Jr.’s Doctor Doom.
Introduced in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, incursions will seemingly play a significant role in Avengers: Doomsday and open the door to Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Men making an appearance. Incursions are catastrophic events that occur when the boundary between two separate universes erodes, causing them to collide and threaten the destruction of one or both universes. The first trailer for Avengers: Doomsday seems to depict an incursion happening in the universe that houses the X-Men.
It is possible that an incursion in Avengers: Doomsday depicts the universes of either Tobey Maguire or Andrew Garfield’s Spider-Man colliding with another. This would narratively fit into a story about the multiverse collapsing in on itself as it would bring in two key variants of a popular character, who were introduced into the MCU in a previous entry.
Tom Holland’s conspicuous absence from casting announcements for Avengers: Doomsday continues to cast doubt on his inclusion in the film, but announcing that Tobey Maguire and/or Andrew Garfield are returning is hardly something Marvel Studios would openly shout from the rooftops. Spider-Man has featured in both Avengers movies since making his MCU introduction in 2016 and it’s hard to imagine that Feige and the Russo Brothers would pass up on an opportunity to include arguably the world’s most popular superhero in their epic team-up movie.
The multiverse, however, allows the MCU to bring a different version of Spider-Man into the fold, other than Tom Holland’s character. Holland’s Spidey seems to be restricted to “small potatoes,” as The New Avengers’ Yelena Belova puts it, meaning his role in the fight against Doom seems less likely. Maguire and Garfield’s Spider-Men, meanwhile, are seemingly key superhero figures on both of their respective universes and, as such, could very well pop up in Avengers: Doomsday, especially as the plot centers around entire Marvel universes colliding together.
Avengers: Doomsday
- Release Date
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December 18, 2026
- Runtime
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165 Minutes
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Vanessa Kirby
Sue Storm / Invisible Woman
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Johnny Storm / Human Torch
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Ebon Moss-Bachrach
Ben Grimm / The Thing
