Jon Watts, the Spider-Man director who walked away from Marvel and into Star Wars

Jon Watts

Photo: Gage Skidmore / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	June 28, 1981 Fountain, Colorado, United States
Occupation	Film director, screenwriter and producer
Known for	Spider-Man: No Way Home, Spider-Man: Homecoming, Spider-Man: Far From Home
Awards	Emmy (shared)

Jon Watts has a habit that few directors in his position can afford: he leaves. After three Spider-Man films made him one of the safest bets in Hollywood, he walked away from Marvel’s Fantastic Four to step back from superhero films. When Apple commissioned a sequel to his own action comedy Wolfs, he handed it back, because, in his words, he no longer trusted the company as a creative partner. And still the studios return to him with bigger keys. The newest one opens the door to the Skywalker Saga.

Nothing in his beginnings suggested that kind of leverage. He was born and raised in Fountain, Colorado, a small town south of Colorado Springs, and went on to study film at New York University. His apprenticeship ran through commercials for Park Pictures and music videos for Fatboy Slim and Death Cab for Cutie, plus a claymation mock documentary called Clay Pride: Being Clay in America. He also directed episodes of Onion News Network, The Onion’s deadpan parody of cable news, where every joke depended on copying the visual grammar of the real thing with a straight face.

That skill for imitation produced his first feature by accident. In 2010, after Comedy Central passed on a show they were developing, Watts and his writing partner Christopher Ford posted a fake trailer on YouTube for a horror film about a father who puts on a clown suit for his son’s birthday party and cannot take it off. The trailer announced the film as the work of “master of horror Eli Roth.” Roth had nothing to do with it. When the video spread, Roth called them, invited them to Los Angeles to pitch it for real and signed on as producer. Clown became an actual film, released in 2014.

The film that changed his career was smaller still. Cop Car, which premiered at Sundance in 2015, follows two runaway boys who steal a sheriff’s cruiser on an empty stretch of prairie, and the sheriff, played by Kevin Bacon, who badly needs it back. Watts has said the premise came from a dream he had as a child. It was lean, tense and very funny about how little children understand the danger they are in, and it was precisely what Marvel Studios and Sony were looking for when they needed a new Peter Parker who actually felt fifteen.

Spider-Man: Homecoming arrived in 2017 with Tom Holland in the suit and Zendaya beside him, staged with an open debt to John Hughes teen comedies, down to a clip of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off playing on a television. Spider-Man: Far From Home followed in 2019, and Spider-Man: No Way Home, which brought back Tobey Maguire and Andrew Garfield as earlier versions of the character, grossed more than $1.9 billion worldwide in the middle of the pandemic.

The critical question about that trilogy is whose it was. Even admirers of its teenage warmth noted how much of it ran on borrowed power: Tony Stark as a surrogate father for two films, set pieces that looked like the rest of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a finale whose biggest moments were the returns of other actors’ Spider-Men. Watts seemed to feel the weight of that argument. In April 2022 he left the Fantastic Four project, and his next film was an original. Wolfs paired George Clooney and Brad Pitt as two rival fixers sent to the same crime scene, written and directed by Watts for Apple. Less than a week before the public announcement, he learned that Apple was replacing the planned wide theatrical release with a limited run ahead of streaming. Apple framed the decision alongside news of a sequel; Watts later said publicly that Apple had not cancelled that sequel, he had. Apple sources described the film as a success. The episode turned a modest crime comedy into a test case for how directors are treated by streaming studios, and Watts chose the side most filmmakers only complain about in private.

His answer to the franchise question came inside one. Skeleton Crew, which he created with Christopher Ford for Disney+, followed four children lost in the Star Wars galaxy with Jude Law as a slippery Force-user, and played closer to an 1980s Amblin adventure than to space opera. Watts was showrunner and directed the first episode, and handed others to filmmakers such as David Lowery and the duo known as Daniels. The series won Outstanding Young Teen Series at the Children’s and Family Emmy Awards, a prize Watts shares with the show’s other executive producers, plus three craft awards.

Away from the camera, Watts, who was born on June 28, 1981, runs the production company Freshman Year with his wife, Dianne McGunigle, a former talent agent turned producer; in September 2024 it signed a first-look deal with Walt Disney Studios. As a producer he shaped Final Destination Bloodlines, sharing story credit with Guy Busick and Lori Evans Taylor and choosing directors Zach Lipovsky and Adam Stein from more than 200 candidates. The 2025 film became the highest-grossing entry in the series, with about $300 million worldwide, and Watts is a producer on the seventh installment. In June 2026 Never Change!, a comedy Freshman Year co-produced, written by and starring John Reynolds, premiered at the Tribeca Festival before landing on Hulu.

Then, at the end of September 2026, the trade press reported that Lucasfilm had chosen Watts to direct the first film of a new Star Wars trilogy written by Simon Kinberg, a continuation of the Skywalker Saga in which Daisy Ridley‘s Rey is expected to appear in some form. Disney has not greenlit the film and no release date exists; Lucasfilm declined to comment. The franchise’s next theatrical release, Star Wars: Starfighter, is dated for May 28, 2027.

That leaves Watts facing the question his career has been asking since the fake trailer: whether he can keep his own voice inside someone else’s universe. He has proved he can make a franchise profitable and that he is willing to leave one. The Skywalker film would be the first time those two facts meet on the biggest stage the industry has, and this time walking away would be the headline.

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Tags: Tom Holland, Star Wars, Jon Watts, Simon Kinberg, Spider-Man: No Way Home, Star Wars: Skeleton Crew

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