Deleted Instagram Post Blows Spider-Man 3's Cover

Sometimes the biggest reveals in gaming don't come from carefully orchestrated State of Play presentations or cinematic trailers. Sometimes they come from a guy in a mocap suit who couldn't resist posting a photo before someone told him to take it down.

Ben Jordan, who serves as the face model for Peter Parker in Insomniac's Marvel's Spider-Man series, posted an image to his Instagram story on April 13th showing himself in full motion capture gear, hands posed in the classic web-shooter stance. The caption read "IYKYK" (if you know, you know), accompanied by a spider emoji. The post was swiftly deleted, but as multiple outlets picked up on it, screenshots had already spread across Reddit and X. The internet doesn't forget, and it definitely doesn't forgive a slow delete finger.

I love this kind of leak because it's so purely human. No dataminer digging through code, no corporate whistleblower with an axe to grind. Just a guy who's clearly excited about his job and momentarily forgot that the project he's working on hasn't been announced yet. The "IYKYK" paired with the spider emoji is about as subtle as a billboard. Jordan replaced John Bubniak as Peter Parker's face model starting with Marvel's Spider-Man Remastered on PS5, and went on to fully embody the role in Marvel's Spider-Man 2, which launched in October 2023 to strong critical reception.

Could It Be Wolverine Instead?

The obvious counterargument is that Jordan might not be working on Spider-Man 3 at all. Insomniac's Marvel's Wolverine is set to launch on September 15th, and if that game exists in the same universe as the Spider-Man titles, a Peter Parker cameo isn't out of the question. A leaked Insomniac roadmap from a few years back also suggested the studio had considered a Venom spinoff before moving to a third mainline Spider-Man game. Either of those scenarios could technically explain the mocap session.

But here's where that logic starts to fall apart. Wolverine ships in five months. Facial capture work this close to release would be unusually late, especially for what would presumably be a minor cameo. Jordan's only acting credit is as the face of Spider-Man; he's primarily a model. If Insomniac needed a quick Peter Parker appearance in Wolverine, they likely would have captured that footage much earlier in development. Everything about this points toward early production work on a new Spider-Man project, with team members likely transitioning off Wolverine as that game enters its final stretch.

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None of this should be surprising. Marvel's Spider-Man 2 was a massive commercial success, and its ending explicitly left threads dangling for a sequel, with Peter stepping back from the suit and Miles taking over as New York's primary Spider-Man. A third game was always a question of when, not if. But there's a difference between assuming something will happen and having a face model accidentally confirm it's already in motion.

for players is what platform this ends up on. The gap between the first Spider-Man and its sequel was about five years. If that cadence holds, Spider-Man 3 wouldn't arrive until 2028 at the earliest, which puts it squarely in the window where Sony's next-generation console is expected to exist. A cross-gen PS5/PS6 release seems like the safe bet, and frankly, I'd be surprised if Sony didn't use a game this big to help sell new hardware. Insomniac has been one of Sony's most reliable studios for years, and a Spider-Man launch title for PS6 would be an enormous system seller.

For now, Insomniac's public focus remains on Wolverine's September 15th PS5 launch. Sony and Marvel almost certainly would have preferred everyone stay locked onto that game for a few more months before Spider-Man 3 entered the conversation. Instead, one deleted Instagram story did what no marketing campaign could: it confirmed the worst-kept secret in PlayStation's lineup, and it did it with a spider emoji.