Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man was planned to enter the MCU over a decade before Sam Raimi trilogy with Marvel Studios’ franchise.
In the 1990s, Marvel combatted bankruptcy by selling film rights to many of their most famous superhero properties. While Daredevil and the X-Men went to 20th Century Fox, Spider-Man was sold to Sony Pictures, who helped build the modern-day superhero blockbuster film with Sam Raimi’s genre-defining Spider-Man trilogy. Naturally, when Marvel Studios initiated their ambitious MCU film franchise, there were multiple attempts to integrate Spider-Man into it, ranging from connecting Robert Downey Jr.’s Tony Stark to Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus in The Avengers.
As revealed in a 2008 MTV News interview, Louis Leterrier intended to have Tobey Maguire’s Peter Parker cameo in The Incredible Hulk. The cameo would have had Maguire’s iteration of Parker appear on the campus of Columbia University, where Bruce Banner would meet Samuel Sterns at the end of the film, but Sony Pictures refused to allow any Spider-Man content to appear in The Incredible Hulk. While the Doctor Octopus connection in Iron Man and Oscorp Tower’s presence in The Avengers would have been simple easter eggs to acknowledge Spider-Man’s existence, The Incredible Hulk’s planned Tobey Maguire appearance inarguably confirms that the Raimi Spider-Man films were almost set in the MCU.
Iron Man’s Doctor Octopus reference was most likely jettisoned before filming began, and it probably wouldn’t have included Alfred Molina, assuming that Sony allowed the reference, so its connection to the Raimi films could have been ambiguous. Oscorp Tower’s near-inclusion in The Avengers would fold the Amazing Spider-Man films into the MCU as well, but it was created as more of an easter egg than a signifier of crossover plans. Leterrier’s planned Tobey Maguire cameo was specifically intended to place the Raimi trilogy in the MCU continuity, and Sony’s veto was the only thing that prevented it from happening.
Leterrier tried to work the cameo into the film, even without Tobey Maguire. When Sony refused to share the rights to their iteration of Peter Parker, his next request was to use the fictional Empire State University (Peter Parker’s alma mater in the comics, as opposed to Columbia University in the films), which they also refused. Ultimately, The Incredible Hulk used a new fictional school, Grayburn College, perhaps making it the MCU’s counterpart to ESU from the comics.
While Marvel Studios ended up collaborating with Sony to create a third version of Spider-Man for the MCU, all three appeared together in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, much to the delight of viewers and critics. The attempts by the MCU to integrate Spider-Man into their continuity show how important the web-slinger is to Marvel’s mythos. It was this precise understanding and appreciation of Marvel’s comics that led Louis Leterrier to nearly include Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man in The Incredible Hulk, almost giving him an MCU appearance 13 years before Spider-Man: No Way Home.
