With recent news that Sam Raimi‘s Spider-Man 4 completely scrapped and everyone involved leaving, Sony has decided to do a complete reboot of the series and bring Peter Parker back to high school. There were many directors rumored to take on the franchise, but Deadline has reported that (500) Days Of Summer director Marc Webb “has climbed to the top of the Sony Pictures’ list.” Another factor that doesn’t come as a surprise after the success of Avatar is they want the film to be in 3D. Check out the excerpt below on why Sony wants Webb.
What has Sony execs excited is the fact that (500) Days of Summer introduced a director with a grasp of how to depict the way young people think and feel. This is critical because the Jamie Vanderbilt script covers the formative years of a high school-aged Peter Parker, and that POV is as important as the action sequences. Especially after Sony and Sam Raimi retired the original Spidey franchise because they realized the film would have been same old/same old at a huge budget. Injecting new blood with an up-and-coming director is a bold stroke. Too bad Webb’s (500) Days star Joseph Gordon-Levitt is too old to play the high school-aged wall crawler. He’d be perfect.
Ah yes, wouldn’t Gordon-Levitt be perfect? But, he can’t be the star of every film we see. I know Webb must not be too disappointed now that he didn’t get the Moneyball gig, but I wonder how “gritty” he could make Spider-Man. His first feature seemed mostly light, although he did handle the relationships perfectly. At least with him the director’s chair we can be happy that this reboot won’t have same ideas of high school as the Twilight audience Sony is hoping to grasp.
Spider-Man is looking at a summer 2012 release.
What do you think about Webb directing Spider-Man?