Spider-Man 4 is not happening.
The Tobey Maguire-starring trilogy ran from the original 2002 Marvel/Sony flick until Spider-Man 3 in 2007, and while the 50-year-old actor has since returned as the Wall-Crawler in 2021’s Spider-Man: No Way Home, filmmaker Sam Raimi has now insisted he will not be getting back in the director’s chair for a fourth flick.
Speaking with Screen Rant, the 66-year-old director said: “Stan Lee’s great character - that a bullpen of writers in New York at Marvel had come up with stories for - he created the character, but so many people contributed, so many artists, that for a brief time I was handed the torch to carry on after 40 years of Spider-Man comics.
“And then after my three movies, I handed the torch off to someone else. And I think they’ve got to keep running with the storyline and the audience that is now following the torchbearer.”
After releasing Spider-Man 3, Raimi began to work on a treatment for a fourth film, but Sony eventually cancelled the movie in favour of rebooting the franchise with Andrew Garfield’s The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012.
Even so, Raimi had nothing but praise for the Spider-Man series and “the producers that make it” - but insisted his version of the Web-Head had “gone elsewhere”.
Now that Spider-Man is “following a new artist” with Tom Holland and immersing fans “really into his story”, Raimi does not feel it would “be right for [him] to go back and try to resurrect [his] version of this story”.
As a result, The Evil Dead director “had to pass the torch happily” to The Amazing Spider-Man creator Mark Webb, and is “honored to have” had it in the first place.
Elsewhere, Raimi has reflected on his upcoming horror/thriller Send Help, which sees a woman (Rachel McAdams) and her sexist boss (Dylan O’Brien) get stranded on a deserted island following a plane crash, before things get dark and violent.
Raimi said of McAdams to The Hollywood Reporter: “Rachel was a great choice because she’s never gone [this dark] before and she really knows how to, and yet she can do comedy brilliantly.
“There’s a very tough woman there who usually just shows off her beauty, her great skills as an actress, her feminine side, but not the monster within. And fortunately, all actors and actresses have monsters within them to bring out; I know from personal experience.”
Co-writer Mark Swift revealed Send Help was somewhat inspired by his “emotional trauma” from being an assistant at a law firm to “very tough bosses”.
He said: “I lived in a cubicle and I often fantasized about turning the tables; I’m not saying I conceived [the movie] when I was in a cubicle, but I had the emotional trauma to fantasize about being on a deserted island with my boss.”
Reflecting on the story of Send Help, McAdams said: “I just loved how twisted it got. If I’m being honest I liked how demented it was and that it really pushed the envelope in terms of human behavior.
“What happens when the training wheels are off and there’s no rules and no one around to tell you you can’t do it this way? You can’t torture your boss, who says?”
