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!

Raimi and Maguire Return

This is the BIG news we’ve all been wait­ing and hop­ing for. Both main star Tobey Maguire and direc­tor Sam Raimi have been locked in to Spider-man 4! This report comes from the reli­able scoop web­site Nikki Finke’s Dead­line Hol­ly­wood Daily. There is not yet a deal for Kirsten Dunst to return as Mary Jane Watson.

Prin­ci­pal Pho­tog­ra­phy & Main Villain

Prin­ci­pal pho­tog­ra­phy is set to begin in the fall of 2009 to tar­get a May 2011 release. The long gap until that date affords time to recruit a main vil­lain; with spec­u­la­tion strongly sug­gest­ing Dr. Curt Connors/The Lizard. The Sin­is­ter Six have also been men­tioned. Vil­lain rumors for Spider-man 4.

Spider-man 4 and Spider-man 5 together

The report also states, as pre­vi­ously rumored, that they are look­ing for angles at pro­duc­ing the next two sequels at the same time because of its cost effec­tive­ness and the dif­fi­culty in keep­ing every­one together.

Venom Movie

And Sony has hired a pair of screen­writ­ers to get going on the Spider-Man 3 spin­off movie Venom. Given that comic book artist/writer and action fig­ure maker, Todd McFar­lane, who is one of the cre­ators of the Mar­vel vil­lain, doesn’t think a Venom movie could do well with a vil­lain as the cen­tral char­ac­ter, my sources think Sony should let Topher Grace, even though he was blown up at the end of Spider-Man 3 (yet a por­tion of the Venom cos­tume sur­vived), stay in the role because the like­able actor could be a a sym­pa­thetic evildoer.

Thanks Robin!

The LATimes are report­ing, via Spider-man pro­ducer Laura Ziskin, that Spider-man 4 will be tar­get­ing a release date in May, 2011 — hop­ing that the movie would be ready in three years time. She also stated that the screen­play wasn’t yet completed.

The hour and a half show, Movie Geeks United, hosted at Blog Talk Radio, has a new episode dis­cussing the lat­est movie release, Fan­boy, and the upcom­ing Zodiac director’s cut — in which they inter­view the screen­writer James Van­der­bilt. Of note to us Spidey fans, he talks about com­ing into the next Spi­der­man movie. Here are some choice quotes via Comics2Film:

“I went in on that. I really loved the films,” Van­der­bilt said. “It’s sort of an odd process because you’re sit­ting down with the peo­ple who made the first three and going, ‘Well let me tell you what to do.’

But I was lucky enough that they were inter­ested in me and I’m a huge fan of those movies, so we closed that up right before the strike. Once the strike’s over I get to go to work.”

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

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.