Godspeed, Spider-Man. Willem Dafoe — who played archnemesis Norman Osborn, the Green Goblin, in Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy and 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home — is teasing unfinished business with the wall-crawler. Although Dafoe’s Green Goblin died at the end of his own glider during a battle with the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man (Tobey Maguire) in 2002’s Spider-Man, Osborn returned as a hallucination in 2004’s Spider-Man 2 and 2007’s Spider-Man 3 before being plucked from the multiverse and into the Marvel Cinematic Universe to menace another Spider-Man (Tom Holland).
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While Holland’s Spider-Man seemingly cured Osborn before Doctor Strange’s (Benedict Cumberbatch) spell returned him to his home universe, Dafoe teased a potential return to the MCU in the upcoming Spider-Man 4.
“We’ll see. We’ll see,” the Nosferatu star told Entertainment Tonight. “I could come back. Tom was great to work with, and the whole series of Spider-Man films that I did were great fun.”
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Plot details remain under wraps, but Spider-Man franchise producer Amy Pascal revealed that the fourth Holland-fronted film will address the aftermath of No Way Home: making the world forget Peter Parker exists.
”We have to deal with the fact that he decided he was going to give up being Peter Parker, and that he was going to focus on being Spider-Man because being Peter Parker was too hard,” Pascal said on Deadline‘s Behind the Lens. “So that’s what the movie is about.”
Pascal’s comments hint at a version of Spider-Man 24/7, a comic book storyline that saw Peter Parker decide to be Spider-Man for 24 hours a day, seven days a week, when two of his archenemies ascended to power in the Marvel Universe: Norman Osborn and J. Jonah Jameson. Osborn became the Iron Patriot and commanded the Dark Avengers as head of H.A.M.M.E.R. (a more extreme S.H.I.E.L.D.) and Jameson was elected mayor of New York, who then immediately launched an Anti-Spider Squad to hunt the vigilante Spider-Man.
The story also dealt with the ramifications of Spider-Man magically restoring his secret identity after the events of Civil War.
Destin Daniel Cretton (Marvel’s Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Wonder Man) is directing from a script by Chris McKenna and Erik Sommers, who penned the Jon Watts directed Spider-Man trilogy co-produced by Sony Pictures and Marvel Studios. The producers include Pascal and Marvel’s Kevin Feige. Holland has confirmed the movie is set to begin production in summer 2025 ahead of an announced July 2026 release date.
“We are super close to having a creative that I think is really worthy of the fans, but I think now we feel confident that the idea is strong enough that we can finally say, ‘This is going ahead.’ We’re going to shoot next summer,” Holland said on Good Morning America in October, adding the story is “crazy” and “a little different to anything we’ve done before. I think the fans are gonna really respond to it.”
After Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu, where Dafoe stars as Prof. Albin Eberhart Von Franz opposite Bill Skarsgård, Lily-Rose Depp, Nicholas Hoult, Emma Corrin, and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Dafoe’s upcoming projects include Abel Ferrara’s American Nails, Late Fame, and A24’s The Legend of Ochi. Meanwhile, Sony has dated the untitled Spider-Man 4 for July 26, 2026.
