Spider-man 4 & Raimi No More

Producers attempt to meddle in creative process ends in the firing of director Sam Raimi and rebooting Spider-man series

Bad news to Spider-man fans. The upcoming Spider-man 4 is scrapped, kicking out Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire, et al., and rebooting the series instead. EW reports that Sony wants “a more gritty, contemporary redo of the series,”

But this is Spider-man, not Daredevil or Batman, or the Punisher. You don't need a Spider-man movie to be dark to be good. In fact, forcing it to be dark and gritty may even possibly make this a bad movie.

EW also reports that Sony was always aiming to reboot the series in 2012 no matter what, but they did want one last outing with Raimi, Maguire, and co. According to Collider.com's Matt Goldberg, "this means that Sony just pushed up the timetable on setting up a crappy precedent where they don’t have to use over forty years of material from the comics, but can just keep redoing the series to suit the demographic with the most purchasing power at the time. That’s why when Sony means Peter Parker is going back to high-school, it means they’re skewing towards the Twilight crowd because they know the fanboys will nut up, take it, and then complain about it after they’ve already paid x-amount of dollars to see it (most likely in 3D; Sony hasn’t announced that for this new movie, but it’s a safe assumption they’ll jump on that bandwagon as well)."

In my opinion, what made the Spider-man movies successful was the masterful direction of Sam Raimi, who is a true fan of the Spider-man comics ever since his childhood. If you ask me, before Dark Knight came out, I had considered Spider-man 2 to be THE best superhero movie. But the third movie, Spider-man 3 was a critical failure because it was already there on that stage that the producers started to meddle with the creative process of making the movie; it was here when they began barking orders to Raimi to utilize their own ideas instead of Raimi's. It would be logically surmised that Raimi would not let this failure be repeated when they set out to make Spider-man 4. Now, the producers have fired him and want a new director they could easily bark orders to.