Ever since “Spider-Man: No Way Home” let Tobey Maguire swing back into the cultural bloodstream, theSam Raimi era has felt like a timeline you could just… reopen. Every multiverse victory lap, every nostalgic cameo, every “what if” interview gets treated like one more match near the gasoline — and fans have spent years trying to will “Spider-Man 4” into something real. Now Raimi is drawing the cleanest line he’s drawn yet: his version isn’t coming back.
Raimi told ScreenRant that revisiting that continuity would mean forcing life back into a story he feels already moved on without him. “Peter Parker and MJ have gone elsewhere. It wouldn’t be right for me to go back and try to resurrect my version of this story.”
And he didn’t point to scheduling or rights. His point was simpler: his take on Peter and MJ already has an ending. “For a brief time, I was handed the torch to carry on after 40 years of Spider-Man comics. And then after my three movies, I handed the torch off to someone else,” he said.” And I think they’ve got to keep running with the storyline and the audience that is now following the torchbearer.”
What makes the moment more interesting is that Raimi’s hard “no” on resurrecting his Spider-Man comes paired with a very different kind of superhero talk elsewhere on the press trail. While promoting “Send Help,” Raimi revealed he once tried to step into Gotham — and got blocked before the party even started.
“I love Batman. I tried to make a Batman film. I couldn’t get the rights,” he said in a separate interview with MovieWeb.
It’s a short quote, but it says a lot. Raimi isn’t talking like someone hunting for the next franchise job. He’s talking like a fan who wanted a specific character and couldn’t get the rights.
The flip side is Raimi isn’t shutting the door on DC. He said he loves the characters and would be open to coming in if the script is right. “Superman’s always been one of my favorites. There’s a tremendous amount of DC characters that I love,” he said. “And it would just take the writers to come up with an original story based on their character, that’s true to the character and part of their real universe, not something that disappoints the fans, but something that’s based on the fans love of the character and brings out the best moment of those characters and their proper conflicts, or the right challenges for the right hero. If it were a story that had a real journey for that particular individual. Then I’d love to make the movie.”
So Raimi isn’t “done” with capes as a concept — he doesn’t want to exhume his own past work because the internet keeps chanting for it. The Spider-Man door, in his mind, stays shut because it’s his door and he’s choosing to leave it closed. The “Batman” door is the one he never got to open at all — and if it ever swings his way, it sounds like it’ll be because the story earns it, not because the algorithm demands another revival.
Ultimately, Raimi’s not swearing off capes. He doesn’t want to revisit his Spider-Man. If he does another one, it sounds like it would be something new — possibly DC — with the right story. Someone send the Bat signal up to DC Studios’ James Gunn?
