PERFECT SENSE

Spider-Man’s ally joins the web of SSU movies…

Debuting in Marvel Comics in 1980, Madame Web was an elderly blind woman hooked up to a life-support machine. But being a mutant and a clairvoyant, it didn’t stop her from fighting crime.

This new entry in Sony’s Spider-Man Universe looks like it’s changing things up, offering a new origin story as Dakota Johnson’s Cassandra Webb, a paramedic, gains the ability to see the future after a terrible accident (just don’t mention The Dead Zone’s Johnny Smith). Needing help to fight fiendish foe Ezekiel Sims (Tahar Rahim), Cassandra joins forces with the second Spider-Woman, Julia Carpenter (Sydney Sweeney), as well as Celeste O’Connor’s Mattie Franklin and Isabela Merced’s Anya Corazon.

Cassandra’s ability to see the future means she’s already read our 2025 preview, too

The first trailer to the movie directed by S.J. Clarkson (Jessica Jones, The Defenders) is out, but there’s still much to speculate about – not least if the film’s 2000s setting means Tobey Maguire’s Spidey will pop up? What we do know for sure is that this is the first female-centric SSU movie, with rising star Sweeney, so good in Euphoria, The White Lotus and Reality, telling TF, ‘We had so much fun together. And I’m really excited that it’s just gonna be a powerhouse of badass females for the world to see.’ A(wo)men to that. JAMIE GRAHAM

ANIMAL TRAGIC

Spider-Man’s beastly foe set to savage cinemas…

If Sam Raimi had ever made Spider-Man 4 with Tobey Maguire, he planned to train his sights on formidable Spidey villain Sergei Kravinoff aka Kraven the Hunter, the Russian nobleman whose family moved to America in 1917 to escape the February Revolution. An obsessive big-game hunter, Kraven wants Spider-Man’s head on his wall.

That didn’t come to be, but the fifth movie in Sony’s SpiderMan Universe is set to give us the origin story of Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson), with a twist – in the trailer, a tussle with a lion leaves him with fearsome animal powers. Sony’s official synopsis says to expect a ‘visceral story’ and points out the action will be ‘set before his notorious vendetta with Spider-Man’. Intriguingly, it’s directed by J.C. Chandor (A Most Violent Year, All Is Lost), who says, ‘The story is a tragedy. When the final credits roll… you won’t have the feeling that this is all going to end great.’ Also intriguingly, the film will be the first SSU movie to be R-rated.

Alessandro Nivola will play big bad Rhino, Christopher Abbott stars as the Foreigner, and Oscar-winners Ariana DeBose and Russell Crowe will play, respectively, voodoo priestess Calypso and Kraven’s terrifying dad, Nikolai Kravinoff.