Spider-Man 4, starring Tom Holland, is likely to miss its originally planned summer 2026 release date. More on the news here.
Sony and Marvel may have confirmed that the next outing for Spider-Man would release in May of 2026, but that date looks like it will almost certainly get pushed back. A month ago, Disney and Sony Pictures booked in a July 24th 2026 release date for a fourth Tom Holland-led Spider-Man film, but that date sounded like a stretch even at the time.
First, the film isn’t going before cameras until May 2025, and sources have indicated that it will be a six month shoot. Those numbers didn’t appear to add up, especially if the growing speculation is true and the next installment is some kind of multiverse-centric adventure, meaning lots of post-production digital work will be needed.
Complicating matters further is the dating of Christopher Nolan’s next film for Universal, a star-studded project (which includes Holland himself) that is sure to eat up IMAX screens for several weeks.
Spider-Man 4 was due to release a week after Nolan’s film and may well have struggled to wrench those giant (and lucrative) screens from the British director’s Oppenheimer follow-up. When it comes to missing out on premium-formats screens, we saw the dent that put into Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning's box office performance last summer. Sony will be keen to avoid that problem.
Disney is also supposed to have a Star Wars movie in the December 2026 slot – and well, its Lucasfilm subsidiary doesn’t seem to be very good at making Star Wars movies. That means the House of Mouse has a gap in its schedule and a Spider-Man film that can fill it (even though this is a Sony film really). A Spider-Man film with a predecessor – No Way Home – that released in December of 2021 and went on to gross almost two billion dollars worldwide.
With some speculating that the production of Spider-Man 4 has also been delayed, expect official confirmation of this soon.
Will replicating every aspect of Spider-Man: No Way Home's release lead to similar success? That film’s box office felt down in part to its novelty factor but Sony seems convinced that it can repeat the trick again. Time will tell, but it looks like that time just stretched out past May of 2026.
