Sam Raimi is talk­ing about Spider-man 4 again, this time with Scifi Wire, although again noth­ing too spe­cific. Raimi hopes that Kirsten Dunst will come on board for Spider-man 4. He goes on to explore the idea of a darker and more edgy Spider-man movie in light of The Dark Knight and Watch­men movies.

“I’m hop­ing that she is going to come aboard, and I’ve got a meet­ing com­ing up with her,” Raimi said in a group inter­view last week in Bev­erly Hills, Calif., where he was pro­mot­ing his upcom­ing hor­ror film Drag Me to Hell. “I think she would like to. But I don’t want to speak on behalf of her.”

With the advent of The Dark Knight and Watch­men, do you expect that Spider-Man 4 will be a lit­tle darker and edgier, too?

Raimi: What­ever it is, I think will be a direct result of the best style to bring about our writer’s screen­play. And as soon as I read that, I will know what that is. Edgy could be a direc­tion, but I don’t think it will be applied with­out really under­stand­ing the character’s jour­ney from the inside out first and then fig­ur­ing out the best way to bring that about.

And then, as far as the other influ­ences, mak­ing it dif­fer­ent from the other films, … I hope we don’t react to these very good and some­times bad super­hero movies around us. I hope that we just [look] ever deeper into the truth of who Peter Parker really is—as a human being and the unique char­ac­ter, and that we cel­e­brate that, which is a lot of the rea­son I want to make this next pic­ture. I still believe I have an under­stand­ing of Peter Parker as the char­ac­ter that I have not quite put onto the screen yet.

I’m not talk­ing about Tobey Maguire’s per­for­mance, which I very much love; I’m talk­ing about my under­stand­ing of the char­ac­ter. I feel like some­times a kid at the piano recital. And I know this piece really well. I know it by heart. And I some­times get it right, and some­times I don’t. But I want a chance to really play it the way I feel it. So I’m hop­ing it’s a really good screen­play and I can express the char­ac­ter through that. I’ve got a really good writer [David Lindsay-Abaire]. …

In order to reach the May 6th 2011 dead­line release date for Spider-man 4, as much as pos­si­ble must be ready in time for the first pro­duc­tion day, as per usual, this means that the David Lindsay-Abaire penned script should be com­pleted by the end of sum­mer 2009, ‘about three months’ to be more pre­cise. SciFi wire also quizzed Raimi about poten­tial vil­lains for the fourth movie, but he declined to comment.

“We have to make the release date, and on all of these pic­tures, the ‘Spider-Man’ films–and I’m sure it’s the same as with many of the other bigger-budgeted films–they have release dates far in advance of a screenplay/ […] So it’s about get­ting it ready the best you can in time for the first day of pro­duc­tion. That’s what we’ve always done, and that’s what we’ll try to do again.”

“I’m not at lib­erty to dis­cuss the vil­lains yet. […] I think I have to wait till the fin­ished screen­play, and then it’d really be up to Sony Pic­tures and the pro­duc­ers to deter­mine when they want to release that infor­ma­tion. To them, it’s usu­ally a big, a big, big thing, a big moment where they want to present the vil­lain with the proper respect or fear that he or she deserves.”

Raimi has also spo­ken out about the cre­ative power he would like to wield for the next movie. This comes after the third movie whereby pre­sum­ably the stu­dio took over some of the cre­ative deci­sions (is that per­haps what lead to the crazy danc­ing Peter Parker scene?), via Empire:

“They really gave me a tremen­dous amount of con­trol on the first two films, actu­ally. […] But then there were dif­fer­ent opin­ions on the third film and I didn’t really have cre­ative con­trol, so to speak.

The best way for me to move for­ward on films, is that I’ve got to be the sin­gu­lar voice that makes the cre­ative choices on the film. I love Spider-Man so much that I’d like to con­tinue telling Spider-Man sto­ries. But only under those cir­cum­stances where I think I can hon­our him.”

MTV has spo­ken Spidey-4 with Sam Raimi; no real juicy gos­sip bits to be had, but good to hear the project is mov­ing swiftly for­ward nonethe­less. It does appear that the dual Spider-man 4 & 5 shoot­ing sched­ule that was pre­vi­ously rumored may have been dropped, pos­si­bly in favor of The Avengers movie com­ing in 2012.

“The writ­ers, pro­duc­ers and I are work­ing out what the story will be, but we haven’t been talk­ing in terms of Part 4 and 5. […] I’ve read that [about ‘Spider-Man 5’] also, but right now we’re just work­ing on the story for ‘Spider-Man 4,’ just that one film.”

[…]

“We’re def­i­nitely talk­ing about work­ing from all the mate­r­ial in the comic books and noth­ing [invented] out­side of that. All the char­ac­ters or vil­lain or vil­lains, what­ever we decide to do will be from Stan Lee’s cre­ations or those that came after him.”

[On who will be the next villain(s)]

“I do have a pretty good idea, but I’m just not a lib­erty to say yet,”

[On Kirsten Dunst in Spider-man 4]

“I can’t imag­ine mak­ing a ‘Spider-Man’ movie with­out Kirsten,” he said, seem­ingly con­tem­plat­ing the idea in his head with a long pause. “Of course it can be done because Spi­der Man has existed with­out the char­ac­ter of Mary-Jane but she’s one of my favorite parts and it would be a shame not to have her in the pic­ture. I’m hop­ing she’ll be in it and I’m plan­ning on hav­ing a story with her in it.”

Mar­vel Stu­dios have announced a slew of new super­hero movie releases dates in the forth­com­ing years — of most inter­est to this crowd are Spider-man 4, now set to appear in screens nation­wide on May 6th 2011 and an updated release for Iron Man 2 — now hit­ting the­aters on May 7th 2010 (pre­vi­ously April 20th).

Also of sig­nif­i­cant inter­est are the Thor, Cap­tain Amer­i­can and The Avengers movie dates which have been updated to:
Thor — June 17, 2011
The First Avenger: Cap­tain Amer­ica — July 22, 2011
The Avengers — May 4, 2012

“This new sched­ule strongly sequences Marvel’s movie debut dates, big screen char­ac­ter intro­duc­tions and momen­tum. It max­i­mizes the vis­i­bil­ity of our sin­gle character-focused films, lead­ing to the highly antic­i­pated release of the multi-character ‘The Avengers’ film in 2012,” said David Maisel, Chair­man, Mar­vel Studios.

Via SHH

J.K Sim­mons is set to return as Daily Bugle pub­lisher J. Jonah Jame­son in Spider-man 4, he tells MTV.

“We’ve def­i­nitely brain­stormed ideas for Triple-J, but I have no desire to make Triple-J more of the focus of those movies,” he said. “The amount that I did in 1, 2 and 3, is just exactly right. Like be the wolf. Come in, blow in, do a week, blow out, be the comic relief, and hit the road. And let Tobey and every­body else do the heavy lifting.”

In speak­ing with Empire mag­a­zine, Sam Raimi revealed that the Mor­bius char­ac­ter inter­ests him, might we see him in Spider-man 4?

“I like it in the Mar­vel comics when Spider-Man fights Mor­bius,” said Raimi. “He’s really cool. A vam­pire! I like that com­bi­na­tion of super­hero plus supernatural.”

Thanks /Film

Dur­ing an inter­view with MTV Kirsten Dunst let slip that she is will be in the next Spi­der­man movie. 

When asked if she was in or is she out?  She replied:

 “I’m in,” said the actress mat­ter of factly. How­ever, when pressed to make the announce­ment offi­cial, Dunst quickly changed her tone, and rather cryp­ti­cally added, “I’m not say­ing any­thing, I know there’s rumors…”

Your guess is as good as mine…

The Times Online are report­ing that Tobey Maguire stands to earn $50m in salary and profit shares for film­ing Spider-man 4 and Spider-man 5 back to back over six months. As part of the deal Maguire has also been allowed time off dur­ing morn­ings and evenings to spend with his young daugh­ter — an excep­tional case due to the planned dura­tion of the shoot.

“Tobey admits he is obsessive-compulsive about every­thing he does, and rais­ing Ruby is no dif­fer­ent,” a friend said last week. “There’s no way Tobey would allow work, no mat­ter how well paid, to get between him and Ruby, and Sony realised that.”

Thanks again Robin!