Spider-Man Concept Art Teases Scrapped Movie About the Sinister Six (Could It Still Happen?)
No Marvel character has spent more time on movie screens than Spider-Man. Sam Raimi’s original trilogy helped launch the modern superhero genre in the early 2000s before Andrew Garfield carried the character through two films in the 2010s. Tom Holland has now led four MCU installments alongside an entire animated franchise built around Miles Morales. Even the two films considered the character’s most divisive theatrical chapter, Garfield’s Amazing Spider-Man duology, pulled in a combined total north of $1.4 billion worldwide, proving the hero’s popularity. That track record continues with Spider-Man: Brand New Day, which crossed $1 billion at the global box office in just six days and remains on pace to become the biggest Spider-Man film ever made. Along the way, several ambitious follow-up projects never made it past the planning stages, and concept art from one of those abandoned films has just resurfaced online.
“Sharing with you some concept art I did for an unmade/untitled Spider-Man film from years ago,” concept artist Victor Martinez wrote in the caption accompanying a newly surfaced Instagram post. The image depicts Spider-Man diving through the air toward a remote island with an active volcano. Multiple missiles launch from the terrain and detonate around Spidey mid-flight. The visual reads like an infiltration sequence set at a villain’s secluded lair, and Martinez’s caption all but confirms the project was built around Spider-Man facing the Sinister Six. “This would’ve been a fun one with lots of villains,” he said, “6 to be exact!”
Will We Ever Get a Spider-Man Versus the Sinister Six Movie?
Martinez’s description points directly to The Amazing Spider-Man 3, the sequel Sony had mapped out as a direct crossover with a planned Sinister Six spinoff. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ended with a mid-credits scene revealing an Oscorp vault filled with tech to be used by the Vulture and Doctor Octopus, with the Rhino (Paul Giamatti) appearance at the end of the movie suggested to originate at the same source. The team was also supposed to include Mysterio, Kraven the Hunter, and a resurrected Norman Osborn (Chris Cooper), whom director Marc Webb intended to reintroduce as the true Green Goblin leading the team. Drew Goddard was attached to write and direct a standalone Sinister Six film built as a villain-focused heist story that would have pushed The Amazing Spider-Man 3 back to 2018, but neither film happened. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed relative to Sony’s expectations, leading the studio to scrap the entire slate, including a planned Black Cat spinoff. Worth noting is that the Sinister Six movie reportedly took place on an island with dinosaurs, which connects to the new concept art.
Because Martinez’s caption specifies a movie starring Spider-Man rather than a villains-only ensemble, the newly revealed artwork lines up with the shelved Amazing Spider-Man 3 concept rather than Goddard’s separate spinoff. Curiously, Garfield’s surprise return in Spider-Man: No Way Home reignited interest in the scrapped sequel, sparking the #MakeTASM3 campaign across social media as fans pushed for Sony to finally let him complete his trilogy. While taking over headlines, the campaign never translated into an actual greenlight.
Sony’s defunct live-action Spider-Man Universe also tried to tease the arrival of the Sinister Six with the post-credit scene of Morbius, as Michael Keaton’s Vulture proposes an alliance. However, Morbius, Madame Web, and Kraven the Hunter each underperformed critically and commercially, and Sony chairman Tom Rothman confirmed the studio currently has no additional spinoff films in active development while the division undergoes a broader creative reboot. With no successor project locked in to replace the failed spinoffs, nothing prevents Sony from eventually revisiting the Amazing Spider-Man 3 concept that Martinez’s artwork just brought back into view.
Meanwhile, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has also built toward a live-action Sinister Six. Spider-Man: Brand New Day opens with a three-minute montage covering the four years since Spider-Man: No Way Home, showing Peter Parker (Tom Holland) fighting street-level rogues like Tombstone (Marvin Jones III) and Scorpion (Michael Mando) as a full-time vigilante. The film also establishes that the Department of Damage Control, led by director Bill Metzger (Tramell Tillman), operates a maximum-security holding facility for captured superpowered individuals while studying confiscated villain technology. Between an established rogues’ gallery and an in-universe prison built specifically for powered threats, the infrastructure needed to assemble a Sinister Six within Holland’s timeline is already in place, and the sequel to Brand New Day could finally bring the team together.
Spider-Man: Brand New Day is now playing in theaters.
