#But I think Miles deserves a fuller intro than a tag scene

[twobitmulder]

MCU Spider-Man 3 Pitch

I have not been the biggest fan of the MCU’s take on Spider-Man, but I do think there’s a way that they could close out his trilogy and make up for a lot of what didn’t work while also staying true to what’s been done in the first few movies.

So picture this, it’s been a few months, maybe even a year, since Spider-Man was framed for Mysterio’s death. Stark Industries lawyers have been able to convince a judge that the footage was doctored to put Peter’s face in in it, but that’s only improved the situation a little bit. Half of New York still thinks Peter is Spider-Man and the other half at least think Spider-Man murdered Mysterio and framed this kid. Happy and Stark Industries have had to distance themselves from Spider-Man publicly because even though Peter Parker is technically legally innocent, Spider-Man is still wanted for murder.

Ned and MJ stand by him, but the fact of the matter is that the world is just against Peter Parker on all fronts....

That’s when Norman Osborne shows up. Norman is a tech genius and his company Oscorp has always been a sort of quiet competitor to Stark Industries. Since the Snap (or the Blip if you prefer) they’ve raised their public profile and are doing a lot of work cleaning up the world. Norman approaches Peter much like Tony did. He knows Peter is Spider-Man and he’s offering him a job with Oscorp, a way to save his reputation and earn some money (Stark Industries covered the legal fees, but the constant attention has put a strain on the already sparse Parker family budget). Norman is putting together a new team, to fill the void left by the fracturing of the Avengers...the Thunderbolts.

Now Peter isn’t an idiot. This all feels sort of suspect. After all, Mysterio came to him as a fellow hero too. So he does his due diligence. He checks with Dr. Strange and looks as far back as he can into Osborne’s past, but he can’t find a blemish, what he does find is that Osborne knew his father, worked with him when they were in Grad school, and it leads to a very tender father/son moment between them. 

So he agrees to become a Thunderbolt on a trial basis. May doesn’t like it, but Peter is 18 and she can’t stop him. MJ thinks he’s nuts. “You got lucky trusting one billionaire, you’re crazy to trust a second one.” Even Ned, trying to be supportive, can’t help but feel that something is off.

Peter meets the other Thunderbolts. Max Dillion, who can control electricity, Sergei Kravinoff, who has enhanced strength and agility, and Dimitri Smerdyakov, their own personal Black Widow and master intelligence operative. They have an early run in with Mac Gargan, now in possession of a suit of power armor and calling himself The Scorpion, but the real clincher for Peter comes when, responding to an attack by some kind of sand monster, they capture a very alive and well Mysterio.

With the path to fully clearing his name now open, Peter comes to fully trust Osborne who tells him how he wants to do what the Avengers couldn’t. He wants to build a suit of armor around the world.

Meanwhile, MJ and Ned are still suspicious and they break into Oscorp where they find Osborne’s scientists running tests on Dillon, Kravinoff, and Smerdyakov. But worse than that, they find Beck and Gargan free, and getting equipment upgrades from Oscorp scientists. They’re captured and interrogated by Osborne. MJ tells him that she’s got him all figured out, that he’s just running the same scam that Beck was, creating fake disasters to swoop and stop. But Osborne tells her that it’s much more than that. Peter represents the possibility of a new generation of heroes, young and impressionable that he can mold and shape, effectively putting the next generation of super people entirely under his thumb. Luckily for Osborne, Beck’s stunt with the doctored footage helped alienate Peter enough for Osborne to get his hooks in.

Later, Peter is worried that he can’t get in touch with MJ and Ned, but Osborne tells him not to worry, tells him that his destiny as a hero is beyond all that and that he’ll make new friends, friends on his level. Osborne shows Peter files he’s been keeping on other young people with powers (and here we can take an opportunity to show off some upcoming characters, I think Angelica Jones, Bobby Drake, and Sam Alexander would be fun Easter Eggs) that he wants Peter to start training to be the next generation of Thunderbolts.

This starts to rub Peter the wrong way and he wonders if maybe MJ and Ned were right. He hacks Osborne’s computers and steals some files on the Thunderbolt Project and takes them home to sort through them. On his way home he gets a call from MJ telling him to meet her in Central Park. 

By the time he gets there it’s dark and he sees not MJ, but Aunt May meeting with someone who looks just like Peter. Before he can call out to her he’s blindsided by a masked man (Kraven, but Peter can’t tell) who pins him down and makes him watch as the False Peter (Smerdyakov) locks eyes with Peter and makes it clear that if he makes a sound he’ll kill May. Kraven asks for the data Peter stole from Oscorpe back. Just as Peter is about to hand it over he sees May wallop Smerdyakov.

We cut to May kicking Smerdyakov’s fallen gun away from him and asking him where Peter is. Smerdyakov’s shapeshifting falters and we see a new form, a blank, smooth white face.

“How?” He asks.

May sneers at him. “You think I don’t know my own son?”

A webline hits Smerdyakov square in the chest and Peter rockets into frame, knocking him onto his ass. Kraven rushes him and Peter yells for May to get clear.

Suddenly an explosion rips through the park. Osborne, in something almost like a cross between an Iron Man suit and and Vulture’s wing harness, swoops down, picks Peter up, and plucks the data stick from the pocket of his suit, then throws him into a nearby building where Peter blacks out.

Peter wakes up in a hazy and brightly lit version of his bedroom. He sits up on his bed and makes eye contact with someone across from him.

“I let you down didn’t I? I tried to...I tried to be better. I tried to...”

“Pete,” an unfamiliar voice says, as we pan to the other end of the room and see, for the first time in the MCU, Benjamin Franklin Parker (I’m imagining Nick Offerman, but Toby Maguire would be fun too). “You could never let me down.”

Peter tells his uncle that he thinks he made a mistake, that he doesn’t know who to trust anymore, and that this whole Spider-Man thing was supposed to be to make Ben proud, to make up for...well, Ben knows...but it never seems to turn out right. It just feels like he keeps getting drawn into other people’s messes and making a mess of his own life and he’s tried to be his own person but it feels like the more he’s Spider-Man the less he knows who he’s supposed to be. Is he Tony? Is he Osborne? Is he an Avenger or a Thunderbolt? Ever since he got drawn into this people have been talking about his potential and he’s afraid that he’s not going to measure up to what people expect of him. And Ben very gently tells him that it’s not about measuring up. It’s not about being the next Tony Stark but better or becoming an Avenger. It’s not about measuring up to anyone’s ideal. It’s about knowing that he’s making a difference because he feels it’s the right thing to do no matter whether the rest of the world sees him as an Iron Man or a menace or an Avenger. And he tells him that he knows he knows he’ll do the right thing, because he can’t not, it’s who he is, it’s in his actions every day.

Peter wakes up to May frantically doing chest compressions on him in the middle of a collapsed public restroom in the park. He almost tells her what he hallucinated while he was out, but he can’t bring himself to. Instead he says they need to get to a computer.

Peter reveals that he made a backup of the data and stored it in the suit’s computer. He opens up the files and they find out that Osborne is planning to release the personal information of his teenage Thunderbolts candidates to every budding super-criminal and news outlet in the world. He’s gonna back them all into a corner the way Peter was, destroy their lives so he can pick up the pieces and turn them into his loyal army.

Following an SOS from MJ Peter find Osborne and confronts him in the Oscorp Tower while Aunt May sneaks in and rescues MJ and Ned. What follows is a climactic fight where Peter takes on Osborne’s Sinister Six while May, Ned, and MJ make their way past Oscorp’s security to stop the data leak. 

The fight spills out into the city and Peter shows off his experience as Spider-Man, staying one step ahead of his multiple foes and pulling civilians out of harm’s way.

May, MJ, and Ned manage to stop the data leak from Oscorp Tower but Osborne reveals he can just as easily release it all from his suit. He points out to Peter that as far as the world is concerned, he and the Thunderbolts are new superheroes while Spider-Man’s reputation is still in doubt. 

“Keep fighting me and they’ll hate you forever” Osborne says.

“It doesn’t matter if they hate me” Peter says, tearing the computer systems out of Osborne’s suit. “It matters that they’re safe.”

The day saved and the villains defeated and incapacitated, Peter limps to the top of Oscorp tower where he meets May, MJ, and Ned, as they watch as the sun rises over the city.

Cut to a few weeks later and the media is still divided whether Spider-Man is a hero or a menace. Norman Osborne has been taken to The Raft after a data leak from Oscorp Tower revealed business dealings with remnants of Hydra, AIM, and the Fisk Crime syndicate. MJ, filling out applications for a journalism major at ESU, looks knowingly proud and justifiably smug as this is reported. 

The film ends as Peter, in his Spider-Man suit, approaches a young girl sitting on the edge of a rooftop, flames dancing on her fingertips. Ned and MJ monitor him from a jury-rigged computer display and talk to him through his suit.

“Hi,” Peter says to the girl, “Angelica Jones?...Can I talk to you for second? I think I can help you.”

Post Credits Scene 1: Peter is visiting Dr. Strange again who tells him that he honestly can’t say if the vision Peter had was anything more than a near death hallucination, but that he should take comfort in knowing that the people we’ve lost can still help us once they’re gone, even if it’s just their memories. Peter presses the issue and Dr. Strange shrugs and says anything is possible. There are infinite worlds after all, different planes of existence, different dimensions.

Peter Scoffs, “That’s just something Mysterio made up to con us”

“Well even a broken clock is right twice a day” Strange replies.

Post Credits Scene 2: Osborne is locked up in The Raft. Footsteps approach. General Ross comes up to his cell and shakes his head.

“Beat down by a kid Osborne. Well, even so, you still put together a damn impressive team. I had some ideas about continuing your little project. I do really like the name.”

#That ended up longer than I expected #I sort of wrote this in a frenzy over two days before the news about Garfield and Maguire broke #I'm not crazy about the idea personally since it's already been done and been done better than the MCU could hope to #spider-man #MCU #peter parker #movie pitch #I had a devil of a time figuring out the Uncle Ben scene but it's too weird to have a whole Spider-Man series without mentioning him #I know it sort or hits some of the same beats as Far From Home but I did not realize that as I was writing it #this ended up as more of a fanfic than a pitch #I realize on the one hand that it might be more fitting for Miles to be the one Peter comes to at the end #But I think Miles deserves a fuller intro than a tag scene #really the best way to introduce Miles would have been while Peter was dead in the five years between Infinity War and Endgame #C’est la vie maybe we get an interquel later