Angelina Jolie in Spider-Man 4? Actress Almost Played The Vulture’s Daughter Before Cancellation

Sony almost cast Angelina Jolie as the daughter of the Vulture in Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man 4 before the film was canceled.

By Mabel Judith Andrady
November 8,2022
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Angelina Jolie was nearly a key part in Sam Raimi’s ill-fated Spider-Man 4. Sony was reportedly in consideration to portray Adrian Toomes’s (The Vulture) daughter, as stated in Sean O’Connell’s book With Great Power, which details the Wall Crawler’s various cinematic escapades.

According to the screenplay, the flying villain is killed off by the results of his crimes, inspiring Jolie’s unidentified character to wear her own pair of wings and thus become Vultress. Toomes’ daughter, a new character designed for Spider-Man 4, would have been a successful executive for the venture capital business trying to acquire the Daily Bugle.

What Would Spider-Man 4 Have Looked Like?

According to reports by The Direct, it’s unlikely that Jolie’s villainous avatar would have simply donned a costume. For his part, Sam Raimi wanted to give Adrian Toomes a more contemporary look than he often had in the comics. The villain’s outfit resembled this in several respects, such as the fact that the feathers on his wings could be flipped out like knives.

The Vulture Spider-Man 4 | Wiki of Nerds
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The filmmaker was also looking for a terrifying moment for the character, on par with Doc Ock’s climactic hospital scene. In this case, the combat scene would have taken place in a library, when henchmen were sent to eliminate the Vulture.

Artist on the storyboards Jeffrey Henderson said that the villain would’ve have received his moniker from the fact that he would have left nothing behind except bones:

“He was essentially a guy that did as a lot of ugly stuff for the government, did a lot of ugly stuff as a private contractor… I thought a clever thing to do would be to say that part of the reason they called him The Vulture was because when he was done, he didn’t leave anything but bones behind.”

Henderson continued by detailing how Vulture nearly succeeded in killing Spider-Man but was ultimately undone by Peter’s heroic last-ditch effort:

“They were going to have a big brawl-for-it-all, where Vulture almost kills Spider-Man. And then Spider-Man at the last minute—he’s really wounded, he’s bleeding really badly, he’s in real trouble—Peter finally, almost as a reaction, forces The Vulture off. When he does, it snaps some of the stuff from the wings, so he ends up just tumbling into the ether, off the top of the Citicorp building. That’s what does him in.”

Why Was Spider-Man 4 Cancelled?

Sony cancelled Tobey Maguire’s fourth film in the franchise after Spider-Man 3 received poor reviews because director Sam Raimi said he was unable to direct it. Many think the director’s dissatisfaction with the series stems from the studio’s interference in the third picture, which led Sony to choose a new director and star in the next remake of Spider-Man in 2012.

If it had all worked out, Angelina Jolie’s Vultress could have been one of the recurring bad guys in Spider-Man: No Way Home. And if Tobey Maguire’s Spidey movies had been better, his Spider-Man may have been brought back for future sequels. This would’ve further meant, no Andrew Garfield in The Amazing Spider-Man movies and eventually no box-office smashing Tom Holland’s Spider-Man movies.

Although Angelina Jolie in Spider-Man 4 never happened, she did enter the Marvel Cinematic Universe in 2021 with the release of Eternals. Even though she has no intention to return, Jolie’s presence in the MCU has made a huge difference to the repertoire of talents Marvel Studios entails.