UPDATE: CBR contacted Sony who stated to the site that the rumor of a "Spider-Man spinoff starring a young Aunt May is a 'silly rumor' with 'no validity whatsoever.'" Not a big surprise, but there you go. We can all move on now and hope that we'll hear some positive news on the Spidey front sooner than later.
Original story:
Remember back when Sony announced they were developing a "female-led SPIDER-MAN movie" and we all assumed it would be Black Cat or another superhero? Looks like there is a chance it may not feature a hero we ever would have expected. In fact, it never said "hero" in the description but just a character from THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN canon. That character is Aunt May.
While the source of this rumor is the hit-or-miss folks at Latino Review, their intel comes with some semblance of substantiation and a rough background for what this spin-off from THE AMAZING SPIDER-MAN 2 would be about.
A movie about Aunt May as a youth, before she was shouldered with the responsibility of raising Peter Parker. The target mood is some sort of espionage story in the vein of AMC’s Mad Men, which sounds like a way of saying “classier Agent Carter” without name-dropping Marvel’s upcoming series.
While the Sam Raimi trilogy had the traditional older Aunt May, the Marc Webb films cast Sally Field as a younger, hipper take on the character. But, even with the more agile Field in the role, there is no basis for this out of left field concept of making May something of a spy. This change is bound to rile comic fans even more than the gender/race swapping of characters like The Human Torch or Jimmy Olsen.
An Aunt May movie would definitely open up more possibilities for the Sony/Marvel properties and provide another female character to anchor their films, but it just sounds way too fan fiction in origin to be accepted by the masses. What do you think?