Exclusive: Henry Cavill In Talks For Spider-UK Movie
Henry Cavill is in talks to play the Spider-Man/Captain Britain hybrid Spider-UK for Sony.
Henry Cavill is in negotiations to play Spider-UK, a Marvel Comics character who is basically a cross between Spider-Man and Captain Britain. According to our trusted and proven sources, the former Superman actor may soon be joining Sony Pictures’ attempt to build a shared universe around yet another obscure Spider-Man character that we have seen so much of recently. In addition to Tom Holland as the Marvel Cinematic Universe basic model, Henry Cavill will be joined by Nicolas Cage as another variant and a whole bunch more in upcoming projects.
There have been persistent rumors of late that Henry Cavill might be up for playing Captain Britain in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but there is no reason why he could not also play Spider-UK for Sony Pictures. The character was introduced in the 2014 Spider-Verse storyline, which involved innumerable variants of Marvel’s favorite web-slinger, including several that have already shown up in various media.
In the original storyline, Spider-UK is Billy Braddock, a member of the Captain Britain Corps, an extradimensional group of heroes who are all variants of Brian Braddock, the Earth-616 Captain Britain. Now that Marvel has opened itself to the possibilities of the Multiverse, we will be grappling with a lot of similarly named characters like these, so get used to the idea of Henry Cavill playing both a version of Spider-Man and the UK version of Captain America.
For the most part, the Sony Pictures superhero universe and the Marvel Cinematic Universe have been kept separate due to largely contractual reasons. Basically, Sony has the rights to Spider-Man, but leased them over to Disney, but can still make movies around aspects of the Spider-Mythos like Venom and Madame Web. It is all a bit confusing and is getting more so by the teased crossover of the MCU’s Vulture (Michael Keaton) showing up to chat with Sony’s Morbius (Jared Leto).
Interestingly, it seems that Henry Cavill may be signing on to play Spider-UK in a solo movie, rather than as part of a larger project like Avengers: Secret Wars, Across the Spider-Verse, or whatever crossover event Sony eventually cooks up. That is a lot of faith to put into a virtually unknown Spider-Man side character, but, to be fair, not really that much more than Dakota Johnson and Madame Web.
Marvel Studios head Kevin Feige recently revealed that the Tom Holland Spider-Man 4 movie was a go and in active development, which certainly implies Sony Pictures is not getting the character back any time soon. As such, it is not really that surprising that Sony would be looking to get a heavy hitter like Henry Cavill to boost the visibility of someone like Spider-UK.
And it is worth noting that Marvel Studios had one of their biggest hits with Guardians of the Galaxy, a then-obscure comic book team, and many predicted a Venom movie without Spider-Man (but with Tom Hardy’s weird accent) could not possibly work. We will just have to wait and see how talks go with Henry Cavill, Spider-UK, and Sony.
