Marvel might be resurrecting Sam Raimi’s scrapped Spider-Man 4 as a comic

Marvel Comics, ever the fan of releasing cryptic images to tease upcoming projects, has released a cryptic image to tease an upcoming project. The company’s tweet, which went up on Sunday, shows a numeral four made out of spider webbing, with a big ol’ spider crawling through it.

Update: Marvel has since posted a numeral three made out of spider webbing on its Facebook page, potentially indicating that this tease is merely a countdown, indicating that we’ll get an announcement on Thursday. But that didn’t stop fans from speculating, with many connecting the tease to something of a holy grail to fans of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy: Spider-Man 4.

Although Sony Pictures dropped Raimi’s Spider-Man franchise and made The Amazing Spider-Man, a sequel to Spider-Man 3 made it all the way to pre-production and even casting. But ultimately, Raimi wasn’t confident in the script.

“I was very unhappy with Spider-Man 3,” he told Vulture in 2013, “and I wanted to make Spider-Man 4 to end on a very high note, the best Spider-Man of them all. But I couldn’t get the script together in time, due to my own failings, and I said to Sony, ‘I don’t want to make a movie that is less than great, so I think we shouldn’t make this picture. Go ahead with your reboot, which you’ve been planning anyway.’”

Many assumed that this tease from Marvel Comics indicated that a comic book adaptation of Spider-Man 4 was underway. In a tweet that has since been deleted, comics illustrator Alex Ross posted his own painting of Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane webswinging through New York, with the hashtag #SpiderMan4.

Still other fans have connected the whole thing to a tweet from Marvel Editor-in-Chief C.B. Cebulski, made on the 17-year anniversary of Raimi’s original Spider-Man.

Cebulski speculates that it’s time for Marvel to have another comic that sells seven figures, a rarity in America’s comics industry today. The previous issue to hit that record, 2015’s Star Wars #1, had its numbers bolstered by a deal with Loot Crate.