Caught somewhere in the web of Internet rumormongering and Sony’s desperate flinging of its Spider-Man franchise, hoping that something will stick, comes this new report from Latino Review: The studio is plotting a movie that will, at last, explore the story of Aunt May—a story that has until now largely gone untold, simply because no one wanted to tell or see it.
Examining how with great power comes an elderly aunt whom we could also maybe make a movie about, unless anyone has a better idea, the hypothetical May: Ante-Aunty (not a real title or idea for a movie) would follow Aunt May in her younger years, when she honed the super spy skills that would someday lend themselves to somehow never noticing that the nephew living in her house is a costumed superhero. It could also show us Aunt May’s first, iconic encounter with eggs, as we finally learn what led her down that dark path toward making breakfast.
As Latino Review notes, Marvel attempted to explore the origins of Aunt May before in the Mark Millar-penned Trouble, which retconned her story to reveal that Aunt May was actually Peter Parker’s birth mother, while also giving Spider-Man fans all the hot, Aunt May/Uncle Ben sex action they’d been craving. Yet somehow, it was incredibly poorly received. So Latino Review says Sony is considering taking the far more conservative, believable tack of making young May a spy amid a setting “in the vein of AMC’s Mad Men,” much as all adults were between the years of 1959 and 1970. Outside the obvious similarities to Agent Carter and the increasingly loose interpretation of the word “original,” this would be an original story, based solely on the studio’s growing anxiety at losing the rights to Marvel.
Of course, it remains to be seen whether this Spider-Man spinoff about Aunt May is a real movie, just the concept of a movie developed for purely legal reasons, or quite possibly a distraction concocted to keep the Internet occupied while Sony pulls off the greatest jewel heist the world has ever known. If only someone’s aunt were here to stop it!