Let’s face it, Spider-Man’s been a mess since the third movie. It’s not just that Spidey 3 disappointed a lot of people that’s the problem, but also that no one seems to have any real idea of where to go with this franchise next, other than of course that they’d like it to keep going. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised to hear IESB claiming that the production of Spider-Man 4, which is apparently being called by the horrible name of Spider-M4N, has been put on hold, indefinitely.
Their source tells them that director Sam Raimi is hung up on a few major issues, mostly notably that they still don’t have a completed script. And why is it incomplete? Why it’s Spider-Man 3 all over again. Raimi is butting heads with the studio over who the villain should be. That same conflict is how we got a Spider-Man 3 overloaded with too many villains, at least half of whom Raimi seemed to have absolutely no interest in shooting. If this is true, it sounds like Sony has learned absolutely nothing from the last movie and they’re still unwilling to simply let Raimi, a proven commodity, do whatever the hell he wants.
So word is that Raimi wants Vulture to be the bad guy and Sony wants anyone but Vulture to be the bad guy. Now I can see Sony’s point of view here, Vulture is pretty much the worst villain in the web-head’s rogues gallery. He’s more of a punchline than a villain really and I’m pretty sure that very few Spidey fans actually care about seeing him on screen. On the other hand, Raimi is Raimi and it probably doesn’t matter whether or not Vulture sucks in the comics, on film he has the ability to make the character awesome. There’s only one reasonable decision here and that’s for Sony to get the hell out of the way. We don’t need another Venom debacle.
