When asked if this was likely, Watts quickly replies: "Oh, yeah. Why not? The thing that's fun for me is to get Spider-Man out of his comfort zone and to take him to places where we've never seen him before. So really, anything is possible."

Compared with Marvel's other superheroes, Spider-Man-who made his first comic book appearance in 1962-is more widely regarded as a friendly neighborhood hero.

"I have always tried to enter the Spider-Man stories from as real an emotional perspective as I can," says Watts, adding that he takes Parker as "just one of us" and "the most relatable person" in Marvel's complicated universe, which also features heroes rooted in mythology or hailing from faraway fictional planets.