Last year it was shocking news when Warner Bros. announced that they had hired writer Michael Goldenberg to pen a sequel to Green Lantern, a movie that was a little under a year away from being released. Apparently that practice isn't considered weird anymore, considering that Sony is now doing the exact same thing.
THR reports that James Vanderbilt, the man who was hired to pen Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man (formally known as the Spider-Man reboot), has already been asked by the studio to start writing the superhero movie's sequel. According to the report, Vanderbilt took a meeting with execs and filmmakers yesterday to outline his plans for the future of the franchise and they liked it enough to give him the thumbs up. The writer was originally hired to write the script for Spider-Man 4 back when Sam Raimi was still attached, but after it was decided that they would start over the studio decided to keep Vanderbilt on-board because of "his character-driven approach to the story rather than a focus on special effects." The Amazing Spider-Man is still in production and is scheduled to be released on July 3, 2012.
I'm really not sure this is the best way to go about scripting superhero sequels. Sure, the studio might be happy with what the writer has presented, but what if there are major flaws in the first film that won't be discovered until after the first film has been released? Yes, they could just throw out or re-write the copy, but is it really worth the money and resources? Wouldn't it be better to figure out what works and what doesn't before rushing to get a script done? We're expected to have blind faith that Vanderbilt knows exactly what he's doing, but considering that they guy's last script was The Losers, that might be a lot to ask.
