You read that headline right. The Amazing Spider-Man director Marc Webb didn’t just talk about the film’s sequel, which is a year away, at Comic-Con. He also spoke about the big picture for the Sony franchise, throwing a bone for fans to think about until 2018, when The Amazing Spider-Man 4 comes out.
In an interview with CraveOnline at the San Diego convention, Webb spoke about the Amazing Spider-Man films, focusing on the second film at first. The film doesn’t hit theaters until May 2, 2014, but it has made headlines with high profile moves, like cutting Shailene Woodley’s Mary Jane part out of the film. There was also a short teaser clip with Jamie Foxx’s Electro shown at the convention.
When asked about Mary Jane, Webb said that it wasn’t hard to cut her out of the second film. “The character was just teased. It was a very minor inflection and I felt it was important to really focus on Peter and Gwen's storyline,” he said. The hard part was telling Woodley, an actress he “loved” working with, that she’d be out of the film. “I'm excited to see Spectacular Now, though,” he said about her upcoming movie.
Then, he was asked about Sony’s surprising announcement last month that it not only has plans for Amazing Spider-Man 3, but Amazing Spider-Man 4 as well. Webb said that he had conceived of his Spider-Man films as a trilogy, so a fourth film could have a chance to focus on secondary characters in the Spider-Man universe.
“I think [for] the fourth movie, what we've discovered is there are so many ancillary characters, that have enormous, cinematic potential that there may be other ways to exploit those characters, in a way that is exciting and fun and worthwhile. It might not just be a Spider-Man movie,” Webb said.
He explained, “You know, what was fun about the comics is that there's an entire sort of encyclopedia of characters and stories and histories and nuances and idiosyncrasies and off-shoots. I think that that is something that seems to be really successful and has a lot of potential so it's sort of, as yet, undefined, but intentionally so.”
Amazing Spider-Man 3 is set for June 10, 2016 and Amazing Spider-Man 4 is scheduled for May 4, 2018. So Spider-Man fans have a long time to ponder about Webb’s comments.
image: Sony