Asa Butterfield has emerged as the frontrunner to play the new teenage Spider-Man after entering negotiations with studios Marvel and Sony, reports Deadline.
Butterfield, 18, would become the third big-screen wallcrawler after Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield. It is understood talks are at an early stage and four other candidates remain in the frame for the high-profile role.
Hollywood is to take a different direction with Spider-Man after Marc Webb’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2, starring Garfield in the lead, failed to wow critics last year. Sony is to allow the character to appear in Disney-owned Marvel’s wider cinematic universe alongside superheroes like Iron Man, Thor and others: the new webslinger is set to debut in Captain America: Civil War next year before returning for more solo movies.
Butterfield would follow in the footsteps of fellow Brits Christian Bale, who stepped down as Batman after 2012’s The Dark Knight Rises, Garfield and Henry Cavill, the current big screen Superman. He is best known for leading roles in 2011 Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning historical drama Hugo and Gavin Hood’s 2013 science fiction tale Ender’s Game.
The casting tallies with reports that Sony plans to make the new Spider-Man a teenager and return him to high school. By contrast, both Maguire and Garfield were in their late 20s when they took the role. There have even been suggestions the studio could try to shoot a Spider-Man movie for every year of the character’s time at high school in line with the successful approach taken by Warner Bros for the Harry Potter films.
Earlier this month Deadline reported that 50/50’s Jonathan Levine, St Vincent’s Ted Melfi, Pitch Perfect’s Jason Moore and Napoleon Dynamite’s Jared Hess were among directors being eyed to take charge of the new iteration.
