Sony commissions Spider-Man 5 and Spider-Man 6 scripts

So here's where things are with Spider-Man 4 at the moment. Sony originally contracted James Vanderbilt to write the first draft of the film, which he duly did. Then, Sam Raimi brought in another writer, David Lindsay-Abaire to rewrite Vanderbilt's screenplay. And then Seabiscuit writer/director Gary Ross was brought in to do a further rewrite, which is where the Spider-Man 4 project is right about now. The plan is still to go before the cameras at the start of next year.

Yet Sony is clearly thinking ahead, and it's thus gone back to James Vanderbilt and asked him to start work on Spider-Man 5 and Spider-Man 6. It's been suggested for some time that Sony was keen to get cracking on a new trilogy of webslinger movies, and this is fairly solid proof for that.

Variety is reporting that Vanderbilt is being asked back as the fifth and sixth Spider-Man films will have a connected storyline. It also reports that this was the plan with the fourth film, but Sony eventually nixed the idea of filming Spider-Man 4 and 5 back to back.

Thus far, there's no confirmation or word as to whether the key players - Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire, primarily - are likely to return beyond the fourth film, but the scripts that Vanderbilt is working on would allow Sony to press the reboot button if required.

In spite of all of these potential pitfalls, Sony is keen to cut down on the time between Spider-Man movies, buoyed no doubt by the churn that Paramount and Marvel has going, with just two years between the Transformers and Iron Man sequels and their respective originals.

In the meantime, we still want to know who the villain is going to be in Spider-Man 4. Can they tell us that before they start writing the next films?

Variety