Although the MCU has expanded the multiverse to bring back multiple Spider-Men, Shailene Woodley‘s Mary Jane Watson remains lost on the cutting room floor.

The 2x Golden Globe nominee recently recalled her performance as Mary Jane Watson being cut from 2014’s The Amazing Spider-Man 2 after filming scenes with Andrew Garfield’s Peter Parker.

“Oh, we shot it. That was a fun phone call,” she said in a talk with SAG-AFTRA. “I was cast as Mary Jane for Spider-Man, which was my dream. Oh my god, Spider-Man’s my favorite superhero, Mary Jane was my favorite character growing up. So, when I got it, I was like, ‘This is so exciting!’

“And then, we filmed like three scenes together, me and Andrew Garfield. And then, like a year later, they were like, ‘So, you’re not in the movie anymore.’ And I was like, ‘What? What do you mean?’ And they’re like, ‘We’ve introduced a lot of new characters in this last one, and we’re going to wait for whatever happens between [Emma Stone] and Andrew [Garfield].’”

Woodley continued, “They were like, ‘Let’s wait for her to die, and then we’ll introduce Mary Jane.’ Which made sense, but then they didn’t make that film. So, there was no reintroduction. … That’s what I was told, but again, who knows what the truth is? I could have been terrible, and they were like, ‘We can’t do this.’”

Although Garfield’s Spider-Man teamed up with Tom Holland and Tobey Maguire in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, he said “unequivocally fucking no” to reprising the role in Avengers: Doomsday, premiering Dec. 18 in theaters. But he hasn’t completely ruled out another movie in his Spidey continuity, which could give Woodley’s Mary Jane her long-overdue debut.

“I really love playing Spider-Man. I would love to play the character again in some capacity, but I think it would have to be very weird,” said Garfield last year. “I think I would want to do something very strange.”

Movie-ticketing giant Fandango is distributing its first film, House of Worship, which opened last weekend at about 400 theaters. They signed on for three days of screenings of the faith-based event pic featuring 25 popular Christian music artists.

It’s the latest push by the Versant Media division as it looks to expand beyond its bread-and-butter movie ticketing. Last month it rebranded its streaming business, and it plans to run its first film through its own growing entertainment ecosystem from theatrical to Premium VOD, TVOD, AVOD and ultimately a library berth.

The film (and a House of Worship album released in January) were executive produced by gospel music royalty Darlene Zschech and Michael W. Smith, with producers Paul Mabury, a drummer and two-time Grammy winner, and John Hartley. Elliott Eicheldinger directed. Fandango said the film is seeing strong engagement from the faith-based audience, though it’s not reporting box office grosses. Theatrical “is not the whole picture. I look at this as a one-year deal. All the way through,” says Jerramy Hainline, Versant’s EVP Digital Platforms & Ventures.

Fandango has already been orchestrating the release of non-traditional theatrical content for a few years, working with rights holders to screen WWE events, the Winter Olympics, a Spanish-language presentation of the FIFA World Cup in partnership with Telemundo, and Love Island USA.

The company launched in 2000 as a JV of big U.S. theater chains and venture capital firms. Comcast acquired it in 2007. Warner Bros Discovery is a minority shareholder. In 2024, Fandango absorbed the streaming and VOD service formerly known as Vudu, which Comcast bought in 2020. Called Fandango at Home, it dropped the “at Home” in July to unify its digital storefront and ticketing under the singular Fandango brand as it expanded its free, ad-supported content. Other projects include creating one unified app for ticketing and streaming and closer integration with sister company Rotten Tomatoes, and international growth. The Rotten Tomatoes app is currently available in Canada, the UK and Ireland.

Versant, which houses most of the cable networks formerly under NBCUniversal, has been moving swiftly to diversify its revenue away from challenged linear television. In a Q&A with Deadline, Hainline talks about the new film and the push to build Fandango into a key driver of its parent company’s digital strategy alongside the Comcast spinoff’s more widely covered and fast-growing Golf business.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

DEADLINE: Versant is an unusual hybrid company, spun off from Comcast with a large cable network portfolio and handful of digital businesses. What is the strategy?  

JERRAMY HAINLINE: Linear cable is obviously a challenged business but it spins off a lot of cash. What’s important is how they fit in an ecosystem. Like Golf Channel. We took the linear television asset and built a digital transactional business with Golf Now and Golf Pass. When I started, 85% of the revenue was coming from the cable channel and that’s gone down to 50/50. The idea is to replicate that in Versant’s other verticals – finance, anchored by CNBC; news anchored by MS NOW; and entertainment and sports, like E! and USA Sports Network. Fandango and Rotten Tomatoes cross that entertainment vertical and the idea is to get them functioning better together.

DEADLINE: Fandango is venturing into theatrical distribution. Why now, and why House Of Worship?

HAINLINE: We’ve been putting content in theaters for several years. It started with the Olympics, the Paris opening ceremony. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, trying to get the USOPC and the IOC and NBCU on the same page. But we were able to pull it off. And people were like “Oh, there’s something here.” So we did the Penn State-University of Washington white-out game. We did something with Epic Games around a Fortnite Pro AM Series at USC’s Galen Center. Then we did a deal with Milan for the [2026] opening ceremony. We did World Cup with Telemundo this summer, which was very successful.