Wiz­ard recently sat down with Sam Raimi to talk with him about the Spider-man tril­ogy, the DVD release and most impor­tantly, what the future holds for him­self and the spidey franchise:

Look­ing back, you’ve worked on Spider-Man in some way for nearly eight years. Has the excite­ment stayed with you?

RAIMI: I’m just as excited about the char­ac­ter, and so in that sense, yes. Although the phys­i­cal energy level between how I felt before I started shoot­ing ver­sus what was left of me on the last day of pho­tog­ra­phy, I was so exhausted at the end of “Spider-Man 3″ I can’t tell you. My love for the char­ac­ters and my pas­sion for the sto­ries are the same, but I was just a shell of the per­son that I was after all of those movies.

If you had to take a break and pick a direc­tor to replace you on the fran­chise, is there any­one at the top of your list?

RAIMI: Because I love Spider-Man I would just say—I don’t want to pick some­one. I don’t know if I’ll be direct­ing the pic­ture or not, but I’d like to say that it would be some­body that was the best gift I could give to Spider-Man—someone who under­stands him and loves him and could bring his pas­sion and love to the char­ac­ter. A char­ac­ter direc­tor prob­a­bly; no one else.

Writer James Van­der­bilt is, at the moment, fran­ti­cally work­ing on “flip­ping” David Benioff’s Wolver­ine movie script into a film-able for­mat before the WGA con­tract dead­line arrives at mid­night tonight (31st October):

Fox’s “X-Men Ori­gins: Wolver­ine,” which is being penned by James Van­der­bilt (“Zodiac”), [… is] among dozens of scripts that are being flipped, a process that actu­ally is unit­ing execs and scribes in one goal: to get a script that is filmable. — Hol­ly­wood Reporter

Whilst look­ing towards the future, it is reported that Van­der­bilt has been cho­sen by Sony exec­u­tives to pen the fourth Spider-man feature:

Sev­eral writ­ers were being con­sid­ered for the fourth install­ment, and Van­der­bilt appar­ently was cho­sen by Sony exec­u­tives for his character-driven approach to the story rather than a focus on spe­cial effects. — Com­ing Soon

A blog net­work deliv­er­ing the lat­est news updates on a range of in-production block­buster movies.

 In an inter­view with Dark Hori­zons, Avi Arad, pro­ducer of Spider-man one to three and every Mar­vel film in-between, men­tioned that he would be work­ing on two new projects: Venom AND Spider-man.

Ques­tion: And the other thing of course is you haven’t really left Mar­vel behind com­pletely right? I mean you’re still per­son­ally involved in Hulk and Iron Man …

Arad: ..and Spi­der­man. And I’m mak­ing Venom.

Ques­tion: So what’s dif­fer­ent about you doing those movies now as against when you were directly in charge of Marvel? 

Who knows which vil­lains will star in the fourth fea­ture film, but there are a few hints out there as to which char­ac­ters will be favoured. First up, in Jan­u­ary this year, Dylan Baker, who por­trays Dr. Curt Con­nor, said this in an inter­view with IGN:

IGN: Have they talked to you about becom­ing The Lizard in a future sequel?

Baker: Only Sam [Raimi]. Only Sam. And, of course, the whole thing is in his head. So as long as his bril­liant ideas keep com­ing, I’ll go with him.

IGN: When Sam hired you for Spider-Man 2, did he talk to you about the char­ac­ter in the comics and what hap­pens to him?

Baker: Yeah, but only in broad strokes. We’re get­ting a lit­tle more spe­cific now, but it’s still pretty broad.

IGN: So you’d be up for a lot of hours in the makeup chair to add the green skin and scales?

Baker: Absolutely!

And in a more recent MTV arti­cle con­cern­ing the next movie, Raimi talked about some of the vil­lains he would like to see:

“I would love to see Elec­tro, Vul­ture, maybe the Sin­is­ter Six as a team”

Slash Film have a great fea­ture dis­cussing the odds and like­li­hood of see­ing each of Spider-man’s foes. They gave The Lizard a 95% chance, Elec­tro 73%, Hydro-man 68%, etc. with lonely Rhino at the bot­tom with a measly 9%.

Back in August 2006 — nearly a year ago now, we had our first insight into what lies in wait for the future of both Mar­vel films and the Spider-man fran­chise. In an inter­view with MTV, Mar­vel pro­ducer Kevin Feige had this to say,

“There will be many more Spider-Man films to come,” he promised. “We already have stacks of ideas for the next one because of the wealth of sto­ries in the comics. We could be mak­ing Spider-Man movies for the next 20 years, based on the 50 years of Spider-Man his­tory we have.”

That doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily guar­an­tee, how­ever, that Tobey Maguire will con­tinue as the man under the mask.

“When you’re con­cen­trat­ing on one movie at a time, there’s a begin­ning and a mid­dle and an end to that process,” Feige rea­soned. “We’ve been top­ping each one as they go, [and if that hap­pens again], that’s the time for those discussions.”

And when it comes to Tobey Maguire’s involve­ment, he denied rumors that he would not be par­tic­i­pat­ing and instead had this to say (via Yahoo Movies),

“I feel like the sto­ries all deserve to be told, and, you know, if… the whole team wants to get back together, and we feel like we can make a good movie that’s worth mak­ing, then I’m up for it.”

In an arti­cle at SciFi​.com these sen­ti­ments were uttered again,

“Well, it’s pos­si­ble that we make another movie,” Maguire said in an inter­view. “It all depends on if there’s a story worth telling. I feel very proud of the three movies that we’ve made. I feel like the sto­ries all deserve to be told, and, you know, if they come up with a good movie, and the whole team wants to get back together, and we feel like we can make a good movie that’s worth mak­ing, then I’m up for it.” 

The arti­cle con­tin­ues, stat­ing that co-star Kirsten Dunst would also be inter­ested in repris­ing her role as Mary Jane Watson;

“There’s an open­ness at the end [of Spider-Man 3], which I like, but … I feel like this is a tril­ogy unto itself,” she said. “And I think if we ven­ture into a fourth, it will be some time from now and in a new way. Because I don’t think Sam can do that: con­tin­u­ing on this same course. I think he needs to ven­ture as an artist and do other things; oth­er­wise, none of us will have any­thing good to bring to the fourth. So I think we all need to ven­ture out a lit­tle bit, and then maybe we’ll come back together one day and do another one.”

This brings us very nicely to the pro­jected involve­ment of Spider-man direc­tor Sam Raimi. In April 2007 he announced that Sony had plans to pro­duce another 3 Spider-man films,  whether he shall direct these is at the moment unknown. Raimi had this to say in an Empire inter­view in July this year,

“I want to help con­tribute to the pro­duc­tion,” he said. “I don’t know if I’ll just be a pro­ducer on it but if I can work with the writer in such a way so that direct­ing would be right for me, I don’t know. We’ve had our first meet­ing on Spider-Man 4 and we’re look­ing for the writer.”

As for who is cur­rently work­ing on the illus­tri­ous project, in Jan­u­ary 2007 a deal with screen­writer David Koepp was sought, though it seems as of July a new writer may be involved.

Alas, today, August 1st 2007, we launch our doc­u­men­ta­tion of the pro­gres­sion, devel­op­ments and story behind the fourth instal­ment in the Spider-man fran­chise. It’s all in the early stages at the moment, but we’ll be here, ready, when the news begins to break.