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"Spidey" Sequel Set!
Well, maybe not everybody, but certainly the key players. Stars Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst and director Sam Raimi have all reupped for a Spidey sequel, to start production early next year.
The writing-producing team behind WB's hip, hot, cape-less Superboy series, Smallville, will pen the script, picking up where David Koepp (Panic Room) left off. Alfred Gough and Miles Millar previously scripted the chop-socky comic Western, Shanghai Noon, and its coming-soon sequel, Shanghai Knights.
No exact dollar figures were announced, but Variety says Maguire stood to net at least $10 million ("an eight-figure salary") plus a percentage of the gross ticket sales.
The news from Sony's Columbia Pictures--really more of a formality, than a stunner--is notable nonetheless in its timing. Usually, you wait for your much-anticipated, franchise-friendly flick to break a weekend box office record, then you confirm the inevitable sequel. Columbia, clearly, was in no mood to wait.
"It was always our hope [to do a sequel], but it was our belief in the movie and what a great job Sam and the actors did that made us feel very strongly about doing a sequel," Columbia executive Matt Tolmach says in the Hollywood Reporter.
All of this is good news to fans who have waited decades to see Marvel Comics' signature superhero emerge from development hell and come to life in a non-sucky movie. Studios don't tend to greenlight sequels to sucky movies. (Well, not ones that don't make money, anyway...)
For the record, Spider-Man starts making money, er, opens on May 3. A buffed-up Maguire is front and center as the title hero and his nerdy alter-ego, Peter Parker. Dunst plays Spidey's own Lois Lane, Mary Jane Watson. Their nemesis is Willem Dafoe as the dastardly Green Goblin. (Dafoe is not set for the sequel--read into that omission what you will as far as the plot of the first movie is concerned.)
As is standard of star contracts, Maguire and Dunst were committed to return for a sequel the minute they signed to make the first movie. Raimi, the cult god of the Evil Dead flicks whose forays into the studio system (A Simple Plan, For Love of the Game) have yielded mixed-to-bad results at the box office, was the guy on the bubble. But no more.
"We are so proud of [Spider-Man]," Tolmach tells the Reporter. "There's no better endorsement than going back to Sam."
In a recent interview with the Australian Website Moviehole.net, Raimi confirmed his Spider-Man 2 signing, but had little to offer in the way of sequel teasers. "We haven't yet got a story so I haven't actually thought about what actors I'll use though," he said.
One actor Raimi does know he'll be using--not counting Maguire and Dunst, of course--is his Evil Dead compatriot, Bruce Campbell. Campbell cameos as a wrestling coach in Spider-Man, and will be back in "a role" in the new movie, the director said.
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