Before Sony Pictures finally handed the reins to Spider-Man over to Marvel Studios, they were in the process of rapidly expanding the SPIDER-MAN franchise with sequels and spin-offs, but when THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 was met with all the enthusiasm of a wet fart, the studio hit the breaks and came to an agreement with Marvel over the use of the character less than a year later. Tom Holland took over the mantle of Spider-Man from Andrew Garfield and first appeared in CAPTAIN AMERICA: CIVIL WAR before taking the lead in the recent SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING.

Before all of this happened however, development was proceeding on what would have been THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 3, which would have brought all those seemingly pointless plot threads from the first two movies together. Director Marc Webb spoke with Den of Geek recently and revealed the scrapped plans for the threequel which never was.

They were going to make a Sinister Six movie before we did the third one. But I wanted...Chris Cooper was going to come back and play the Goblin. We were going to freeze his head, and then he was going to be brought back to life. And then there was that character called The Gentleman. We had some notions about how to do it, but I think maybe we were thinking too far ahead when we started building in those things. But it was a fun exercise. I look back very fondly on those days.

In case you forgot, Chris Cooper put in a very brief appearance as Norman Osborn in THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2, so brief that you wondered why they needed an actor of Cooper's caliber to pull it off. Norman Osborn died after his brief scene, but a deleted post-credit sequence would have seen The Gentleman (Michael Massee) paying a visit to his cryogenically frozen head, seemingly setting up Norman's resurrection. However it happened, Webb said that Norman Osborne was going to be the main villain of the film and lead the Sinister Six.

All this careful planning proved to be fruitless once the decision was made to reboot the SPIDER-MAN franchise, but it hopefully served as a lesson for Sony - don't get so involved in laying the groundwork for future sequels when you should be concentrating on what you've got in front of you. For his part, Marc Webb accepts responsibility for how THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN movies turned out, but he says that he would likely approach the franchise differently now if he had the chance.

Well, I think I'd just take more time making those movies. But that goes into accepting, when you sign up for it, making clear what you're willing to accept. I didn't know how to build a movie like that when I was starting off. So I think I'd be more careful about that now.

Spider-Man will next appear in AVENGERS: INFINITY WAR on May 4, 2018, but the web-slinger will be back for another solo adventure in a sequel to SPIDER-MAN: HOMECOMING on July 5, 2019.