Nikke Finke posted an email sent out to VFX teams working on the upcoming Spiderman 4 indicating that the film would not meet it’s coveted May release date.
Hey there–
We were just notified that our schedule is pushing. We will NOT be starting as planned. I’m terribly sorry for this news, and I hope this email reaches you in time to find other options. We do not know how long we are pushing, and we will not know until mid-January. By mid-January, we will be told how long the push is, whether it be 2 weeks, 2 months, or something else. The studio has every intention of making the movie, but we no longer have a confirmed start date.
Again, I’m terribly sorry, but Sam Raimi has story issues [that] need to be resolved before we are ready to shoot.
VFX Team
The story has since been confirmed, and now Raimi and Sony are anxiously waiting a rewrite from screenwriter Alvin Sargent (Spidey 2 & 3). Sargent is also married to franchise producer Laura Ziskin. In another interesting bit, it seems that the production dropped Anne Hathaway “after they realized her pricetag was too high and they don’t really need another big name Hollywood star to sell the film.” Wow. If Alvin Sarget’s writing this and Vulture is really the villain, I think you can count me out of this one. Sounds like the symbiote got hold of this production.
-Brian
They really need to bring in Michael Chabon once again to help doctor up the screenplay Sargent is writing. Sargent was on the second Spidey film, but from all I've read it was Chabon's help on it which really solidified things.
I read that the dispute is over the villain or perhaps villains. If its true about Vulture and Vulturess, thing it's probably a good thing that they stopped and want to rewrite it.
Dennis
I dread this movie. Didn’t they learn anything from Spider-Man 3?
So far they've learned not to rush into another sequel and ruin it. I hope they get the story straight because I'd rather wait a few months than watch another terrible Spider-man film.
Sony may be rushing things…and I may have to research this more so I am assuming….because with Disney's acquisiting of Marvel there's a chance that when the time to renew their licensing of the Spder-man franchise they won't get to. While the third film was not very good it still brought in the most money for the series and definitely made Sony a happy company.
From the way Marvel/Disney have been talking about properties of their licensed by other studios that will change once their time is up.
I doubt Marvel will ever get the rights back for Spider-man because as long as Sony has a film in development, they'll maintain the exclusive rights. If say, they milked the cow for however much it was worth and no more money was being made for Spider-man, that's when Marvel would have a chance at getting the rights back.
Think of the way Fox is constantly rebooting Fantastic Four and Daredevil just to maintain the rights.
Agreed, I'd wait a whole year or more in order to get another good Spider-Man movie, there's no point in rushing to make another crappy sequel.
Dennis
True and you just sort of made my point for me. I think we're both right in effect. Sony needs to keep the franchise running or lose the rights. The problem with that is if Raimi leaves and whoever takes over does a cock-up job of it then there's a chance the franchise will suffer in the long run. I don't think Sony could manage to make a Spidey film on the cheap.
Well it's hard to say right now, we've seen quite a few directors make a few films for cheap that look great. Micro budget films could be the next big thing and we could see a decent spider-man fiml made for $30 to $100 million.
As for whoever makes it, it doesn't matter because Sony will have a hand in it. They seemed real cool at the beginning of the last decade but at the end of the decade they sucked it up really bad with part three pushing Venom in their forcing Raimi to make bad decisions and create a bad film.
[...] things, Malkovich was asked about whether he had been approached to the play the villain and the production delay. BadTaste.it translated a summation of what was [...]