Original Trilogy Spider-Man Actor "Disappointed" He Never Got to Play This Classic Villain

Director Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy is the stuff of Hollywood history, but it's not complete: Raimi’s fourth Spider-Man movie never got made. Although planning was well underway for a fourth movie starring Tobey Maguire as the web-slinger, the studio behind the movies ended up changing course and instead made a new series of Spidey films with Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker. 

That was a bummer for fans of Raimi’s take on the iconic superhero, and it was especially a bummer for Dylan Baker, an actor who had a minor role as Dr. Curt Connors in the second and third films that was supposed to pay off big-time when his character transformed into the supervillain The Lizard in the fourth film. Alas, that did not happen, and as Baker recently revealed in an interview with ComicBook, he was disappointed that he wouldn’t get to have his villainous turn. 

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Dylan Baker on Playing Spider-Man's Dr. Curt Connors but Missing Out on Playing The Lizard

“I have to say, when Sam Raimi called me up and said that he was not going to be carried on to direct Spider-Man 4 [I was disappointed]," Baker explained. "He started to tell me about the script he had written and was ready to do and ready to shoot, but it was not going to be able to be done at the time they wanted it to be done."

Spider-Man 4 had originally been planned for a 2011 release, four years after Spider-Man 3 swung into theaters. However there were difficulties with the scripts, none of which were to Raimi’s liking, and eventually he walked from the project when he said he wouldn’t be able to hit the targeted release date. In early January of 2011, Sony Pictures decided to scrap the whole thing and instead start a new franchise, casting Garfield as Spider-Man and Rhys Ifans as Kurt Connors/The Lizard.

"It was just letting the Lizard come out and see the world and it just killed me. I would have loved to have done that,” Baker said of the whole episode. “Luckily, Rhys Ifans was fantastic and I got to go, 'Very well done,' while wishing I could have done it."

In a recent interview, Raimi recently shot down rumors that he was getting around to making Spider-Man 4 after all, more than a decade after the original plans fell through.

Although Baker never got a chance to get all scaly, you can still see him in human form in Spider-Man 2 and Spider-Man 3, now streaming on Peacock along with the 2002 original.