I’m not sure whether we should just take this with a pinch of salt or not. Following the news earlier this week that Sam Raimi is stepping down as director of Spider-man 4, and that Sony is moving forward with plans to reboot the franchise, it was inevitable that speculation would immediately start about which director would take over.
Right from the get go, one of the names that cropped up was Marc Webb, who made last year’s indie hit, (500) Days Of Summer. However it was difficult to know whether this was because Sony was genuinely looking at him, or because at the moment he’s the hot young thing who gets mentioned when there’s a vacant director’s chair on any major Hollywood movie.
However, now Deadline Hollywood is saying that Webb is at the top of Sony’s wish-list for the Spidey reboot, and that “Webb met about the Spidey reboot with the pic’s producers and executives looking to get the picture into production later this year for a Summer 2012 release.”
Apparently “What has Sony execs excited is the fact that (500) Days of Summer introduced a director with a grasp of how to depict the way young people think and feel. This is critical because the Jamie Vanderbilt script (for the reboot) covers the formative years of a high school-aged Peter Parker, and that POV is as important as the action sequences.”
It’s tough to know at this point whether this is all just speculation or whether there’s something more substantial underneath. Webb is already attached to films like Just Another Love Story and a remake of Jesus Christ Superstar, so it’ll be interesting to see whether he’s going to slide Spidey in as well.