I feel like I’ve slipped back four years to a time when endless stories were floating around about how Sony and Sam Raimi were fighting over the villains that should appear in Spider-man 3. After that film was criticised for having villain overload, it initially looked like the studio was going to be more accomodating to Raimi’s wishes for the fourth outing, but that isn’t how it’s turned out.
Indeed we’ve now reached the situation where wrangling over the villains and the script for Spidey 4 have gotten so bad that the whole movie has now been delayed while they sort everything out.
Following rumours in December, it’s now being officially reported that Sony has delayed the Spider-man 4’s planned February production start, which seems to suggest that the May 11th, 2011 release date is also in jeopardy. THR says the problem is that Raimi wants the villain to be The Vulture, while Sony hates this idea and instead wants the voluptuous Black Cat in the movie, who would get involved in a romantic subplot with Spidey, as well as another villain.
An endless succession of writers have been brought it to try and find a script everyone is happy with, but so far that hasn’t happened, and it seems the two factions are still so far apart that there’s no way filming can commence next month (which is better than the old Hollywood method, where you started shooting anyway and hoped the screenplay would sort itself out during filming). While the film could still hit its May 2011 release date, it’s now much more likely we won’t get to see the movie until late summer 2011 at the earliest, and with Sony saying they won’t begin filming until the script is write, even that’s not guaranteed.