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Remember That Spider-Man Nightwatch Movie Rumour From A Year Ago? It's Back, And With Spike Lee Directing

Around this time last year, Bleeding Cool ran a story that Sony was looking at putting the Spider-Man character Nightwatch in their Spider-Verse movies. This was based on reports of Sony employees buying copies of the comic from a certain comic book store of our acquaintance. The time seemed right for Spider-Man: Homecoming, so we asked if Nightwatch would be a character appearing in the movie.

He didn't. But why were Sony employees buying so many copies of both the Nightwatch monthly series and his previous appearances in issues of Web Of Spider-Man?

Yesterday we may have had the answer.

On the Meet The Movie Press YouTube video 5 minutes in, regular contributor Jeff Sneider stated that Sony is developing a Nightwatch movie to be written by Edward Ricourt set in the Spider-Man Universe about Dr Kevin Trench, finding a costume on a the dead body on his future self that Spike Lee may direct. And this may be Sony's "black superhero movie", to sit alongside Warner's Cyborg and Marvel's Black Panther.

Nightwatch is a comic book character invented by Terry Kavanagh and Alex Saviuk for the Web Of Spider-Man series for Marvel Comics back in 1992.

Caught in a time loop, Nightwatch was born the day he discovered his dying body, travelling in time from the future, and stole the strange, sentient costume from himself – and then tried to avoid his inevitable fate. Spinning off into his own Nightwatch series, he failed. The character was then revived without explanation in She-Hulk.

It has been observed that Nightwatch resembled Todd McFarlane's character Spawn quite a lot. Who has already had one film, an animated series and a new movie in the works.

I talked to the character's co-creator, Terry Kavanagh, who told me,

  From what I remember, we created Nightwatch to be a spooky, dark character with a science-fiction background, as I was interested in playing with the contrast. I asked for specific elements like the prehensile cape, and a shadow-like darkness that always surrounded and followed him, but Alex Saviuk designed the actual look. Alex might have been inspired by Spawn– a lot of character design was inspired by Image characters in those days– but I'm not sure.

I wonder what a Spike Lee version would look like…

Those who picked up copies for cheap last year might be laughing – even though the price crashed in the interim…

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