Filmmaker and actor Olivia Wilde has reportedly signed a deal with Sony Pictures to direct a Marvel film project revolving around a female character in the universe. Not many details have been disclosed, but the film is expected to centre around Spider-Woman (or at the very least a character sporting the name ‘Spider-Woman’). Although this news is yet to be officially confirmed, but seeing that Sony has a partnership with Marvel to produce films based on the Spider-Man characters, the speculations are not unfounded. Additionally, after the news about her participation in the project went live, the director herself retweeted an article reporting on the same, with a spider emoji in the caption, fuelling the speculations that her secret Marvel project is, in fact, a Spider-Woman movie.
History of Spider-Woman in the Marvel Universe
The Spider-Woman character has been the alter ego of several characters in the Spider-Man timeline over the years, including Jessica Drew, Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson. The original Spider-Woman was Jessica Drew–a character introduced to Marvel Comics in the late 1970s. Her character did not have any significant tie to Spider-Man. Instead, her origin involved her being injected by her father with a serum containing irradiated spiders’ blood. Over the decades she has donned many hats, including being a brainwashed HYDRA agent, a member of the Avengers, and a private detective.
Hence, it’s no surprise that Jessica Drew is the character that Marvel fans think of when they hear of Spider-Woman. But what makes this development tricky is that there has emerged another prominent character who also goes by that name: the alternate universe Gwen Stacy who was bitten by a radioactive spider. While she is commonly referred to as Spider-Gwen in her solo series comic, in the actual continuity the character goes by the moniker Spider-Woman (which is something that was notably included in the film Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse during the character’s official introduction). It thus remains to be seen which of these characters will wear the costume of Spider-Woman this time.