Source: Variety
Oh WOW. This is crazy. Variety has reported that Columbia Pictures’ Spider-Man 4, directed by Sam Raimi, is no more! Details below:
Director Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker/Spider-Man), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson) and John Malkovich (who was supposedly playing “Vulture” in the 4th film) are all gone. Instead, Sony is now rebooting the franchise without them by using a script from James Vanderbilt that deals with Peter Parker/Spider-Man in high school, and recasting the lead roles.
It appears that the studio was already preparing for this for a while now, as there were delays due to problems with the script. That’s right folks, the Spider-Man films that we have already witnessed are supposedly done and will apparently no longer proceed beyong the trilogy.
Here’s what Columbia had to say:
“Peter Parker is going back to high school when the next Spider-Man hits theaters in the summer of 2012. Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios announced today they are moving forward with a film based on a script by James Vanderbilt that focuses on a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.”
Sam Raimi, who disagreed with the direction Spider-Man 4 was going, supposedly has no hard feelings towards the studio. He had this to say:
“While we were looking forward to doing a fourth one together, the studio and Marvel have a unique opportunity to take the franchise in a new direction, and I know they will do a terrific job.”
This does come as a total shock to me, and the idea of already rebooting the franchise seems ridiculous, but I don’t think that this is a bad thing for Raimi. He now can go on to do his World of Warcraft movie, which means he could finally make Evil Dead 4 a whole lot sooner! Actually, I kind of hope the World of Warcraft movie gets put on hold to be honest. All of Raimi’s fans want to see the “Deadites” rise again.
On the other hand, this spells certain doom for the Spider-Man franchise. Sure, Spider-Man 3 was not so great, but a good sequel to make up for it would have been a lot better than rebooting the whole thing. I hate how studios have jumped on the “rebooting” bandwagon, whether something needs rebooting or not.
