During last night’s CinemaCon presentation, Sony announced yet another villain focused, Spider-Man spin off movie: El Muerto.
Okay, here’s the cool thing, El Muerto will mark the first Latin “superhero” to take the lead in a Marvel film for Sony. Also cool is that Bad Bunny (who’s a big time wrestling fan and starring in the upcoming Bullet Train movie) actually dug into Spider-Man‘s lore to find the character and pitched it to Sony himself. So he’s clearly engaged in the character and passionate about it.
The weird thing, however, is that we’re getting a movie based on a character who has only appeared in TWO comics total. Seriously, throughout all the many decades and dozens of different comic titles/spin offs, El Muerto has only appeared TWICE for a back-to-back story arc in Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man.
In those comics, El Muerto is a super-powered Luchador who fights Spider-Man in a charity match…in which he almost manages to unmask the hero. When he fails and another super-powered wrestler comes to kill him, Muerto and Spider-Man team up.
So yeah, not a whole lot to work with there, but honestly maybe that’s not a terrible thing. This means they can pretty much do whatever they want with the character as there’s not much lore to contradict! It’s a blank page to craft a new hero/anti-hero within their world. Maybe I’m just salt because these random characters are getting solo films while I still haven’t seen Hobgoblin in live-action…
El Muerto is being fast tracked in order to keep up with Bad Bunny’s busy schedule and is already slated to release on January 12, 2024.
