ELFSAR BLOG

Sony/Columbia has decided to pull the plug on the drain and wash the Spider out on Spider-Man 4.  Signs of trouble appeared last week when the studio announced that the production was put on hiatus.  Now the studio has decided to fire director Sam Raimi who was responsible for all three of the highly successful Spider-Man films and ditch Tobey Maguire, Kirsten Dunst and any of the other high priced talent as well.  In a successful series such as Spider-Man all the key players generally get raises for each subsequent film, which naturally drives up production costs.

The studio is under the ‘use it or loose it’ license agreement, which means they could risk losing the rights to the Spider-Man character if it doesn’t produce a new film.  The rights would fall back to Marvel/Disney.  But they have a contingency plan just in case there were problems with the Raimi-helmed Spider-Man 4.  The plan involves a “reboot” script by James Vanderbilt that takes Spidey back to high school in a version that will feature all new younger actors and cost the studio far less to produce thus giving them a hight profit margin.  Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin, who have been involved in the production of all 3 Spider-Man movies, will be producing the new Spider-Man film.  The new teenage Spider-Man movie, which has no stars or director attached at present, is slated to debut in the summer of the end of the world…er… I mean… 2012. 

Spider-Man 4 had originally been scheduled for early May of 2011, thus it was a very bad sign for the film when, in the wake of stories about delays in the production of the next Spider-Man film, Marvel Studios moved the debut of its Thor movie into the Spidey 4 slot, which just happens to coincide with Free Comic Book Day .  Reports indicate that the studio was unhappy with the script for Spider-Man 4 and the villain (The Vulture) that Raimi had chosen for the film.  Raimi, who obviously could have been a diplomat if he had wanted to, told Variety: “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.”

Though the studio will save a potentially huge amount of money in production costs by rebooting the series, Sony/Columbia is messing with a billion dollar franchise.  Let’s hope the studio is not jettisoning the character-driven approach that made the first two films in the series so compelling.