What If...? writer A.C. Bradley revealed a Spider-Man storyline could not make the PG-13 rating of the show and had to be scrapped. Talking to The Post Credit Podcast, Bradley disclosed a story involving Spider-Man becoming a giant spider, which would bring too much “body horror” to the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Talking about episodes that never got beyond pre-production, Bradley said that "there were a couple of episodes that were just a little too dark.” As Bradley explains it, in one of these scrapped episodes, “Spider-Man turns into a real spider, and that was just too dark and too body horror for their PG-13 [rating]." It’s unclear if Spider-Man’s superpowers would accelerate and cause the mutation or if a villain would turn Peter Parker into a giant arachnid. In any case, it’s a shame we don’t get to see this happening on screen.
The scrapped What if..? episode could reference the 1990s Spider-Man: The Animated Series, which introduced Man-Spider, the ultimate step on Peter Parker’s spider-mutation. This Spider-Man version spits acid and can shoot webs from all its six upper limbs without a web-shooter while displaying animalistic behavior that puts it into a destructive spree. Other series and comic books also dealt with Peter Parker’s transformation into a giant spider, so it’s not like body horror is something new to the Web Crawler fans.
Now that Loki unleashed alternate MCU timelines, What If..? will show us alternated corners of the Universe where everything is possible. The series will make Peggy Carter the Captain after taking the supersoldier serum, show Spider-Man hunting zombies while wearing Doctor Strange’s Cloak of Levitation, and feature Chadwick Boseman's voicing four different T'Challa Variants. These events will all be considered canon, as the MCU prepares to explore the multiverse in upcoming theater releases such as Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness and Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania.
What If...?’s nine episodes will debut on Disney+ weekly every Wednesday, starting tomorrow, August 11.