How Young Will SPIDER-MAN Be? Try 15.

I hope you don’t mind the tribute to an obscure 1970s TV show in the  above image.

Ever since an agreement between Marvel and Sony over the film rights to Spider-Man has been announced, we have been hearing talk that this Spidey will be younger, still be in high school, and the film would resemble a John Hughes movie more than anything that had come before it. . Now we are hearing exactly how young the web-slinger will be.

Cinema Blend is reporting on an interview with Jon Watts, the director chosen for the 2017 Spider-Man reboot, did with Empire Magazine. Naturally, they talked to him about what we can expect from the new Spidey.

There are only so many times that you can kill Uncle Ben. I love the idea of making a coming-of-age high-school movie. We’re really going to see Peter Parker in high school and get deeper into that side of it. He’s just 15 now.

They weren’t kidding about going young with the character. This will put Peter Parker square in the middle of high school for a number of films, which will serve to differentiate it from the last two go rounds. Neither installment spent more than one movie in high school and barely examined Peter’s life there. However, one concern is that they cast 19-year old Tom Holland in the lead role. This means that by the time the first new film rolls around, you will have an actor who is legally able to drink in the U.S. playing a character who isn’t legally able to drive in the U.S..

Casting older actors for teenage parts is nothing new, but one of the criticisms of the previous films was that both Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield were getting too old to play such a young character. The same will eventually happen here.