Sony Pictures has announced that they have squashed "Spider-Man 4" and will now reboot the series with a new cast and director. This piece of shocking news has sent waves all across the pop culture spectrum. I'm terribly disappointed that we don't get a chance to see if Sam Raimi could erase "Spider-Man 3" from our minds and wrap up the series on a good note. Instead, Sony is taking Spidey back to his high school roots and is already working on two scripts with a 2011/2012 starting date.
Spider-Man is my favorite superhero of all time. Just ask my friends or come to my apartment and you will find plenty of Spidey memorabilia. We would NOT have comic book motion pictures as we know them today if it wasn't for "Spider-Man"'s success in 2002. To this day I don't think that I have never been more excited about a movie than I was back in 2002. The fact that Sony picked a director that was a passionate Spider-Man fan and cared about his product is what made the first two pictures a great success. There's no secret that the third film had problems. Sam Raimi admitted that and was looking forward to erasing it from our minds. I had hope for the guy, especially after he took a break and made the popular film, "Drag Me To Hell." Word is starting to leak out that Sony and Raimi have been debating over the script for number 4 for sometime now. Apparently, one of the main points was that Raimi wanted to stick with Vulture as the villian and Sony wanted someone/something else. Vulture is not my favorite villian, but the fact that John Malkovich was interested in the role was very exciting. As a Spidey fan, who wouldn't be excited to see Malkovich try to rip apart the Web-Crawler?? I think the studios were hoping for a darker picture and Vulture wasn't what they had in mind. With Vulture and the possibility of using Lizard, that sounds like a good movie to me. The most exciting scenario to me would have been using Kraven as the villian and implementing Lizard into the story since we've seen him in the first 3 movies. After working and reworking, Sony finally decided that it was best to move the franchise in another direction.
So, the "new" Spider-Man franchise already has part of a script, but no director, actors, or definite timetable. I wish I could say that the studio will realize that they are making a mistake, but they hardly ever do. For Sam Raimi and Tobey, I'm sure they are glad that they can move on with their careers. "Spider-Man" helped make comic book movies what they are today. Was Raimi really going to correct himself? What kind of picture would we have seen in "Spider-Man 4?" I guess we will never know....so as the Green Goblin says in "Spider-Man," "Godspeed, Spider-Man."
