So this is going to be the new “thing” for superhero movies now? One isn’t enough, so hot on the heels of Joss Whedon‘s $1 billion-grossing “The Avengers,” and whatever Zack Snyder‘s Batman/Superman team-up movie is going to be called, director Marc Webb, while talking up next summer’s 3D web-slinging adventure “Amazing Spider-Man 2,” teased that the fourth film (yes, the fourth) in the franchise might be some kind of team-up movie. “It might not just be a Spider-Man movie,” Webb told Crave Online. If it’s not just a “Spider-Man” movie could we hope that it’s also a “Star Trek” movie? Or maybe “Resident Evil?” Just so we can kill two franchise birds with one stone? At the very least it’d make the summer of 2018 go by a little quicker.
Apparently Webb has locked himself into doing these movies until the end of time, because nothing makes your filmography pop like numbers after the words “Amazing Spider-Man,” and was quoted recently as being in it to win it, at least through the fourth movie (out in 2018). When asked about whether or not the story he’s telling will go beyond three movies, since most franchises have a trilogy mentality these days, Webb was quick to say that while they had a trilogy in mind, it can go further. “Well, I think this was conceived of as a trilogy so there was a defined architecture to the story we were telling and we had sort of a rough outline of what was going to happen,” Webb explained. “I think the fourth movie, what we’ve discovered is there are so many ancillary characters that have enormous cinematic potential that there may be other ways to exploit those characters, in a way that is exciting and fun and worthwhile.”
From the looks of things, Webb is going to add a ton of characters to “Amazing Spider-Man 2” (including Jamie Foxx as Electro, Paul Giamatti as The Rhino, Dane DeHaan as Harry Osborn, Chris Cooper as Norman Osborn plus a number of supporting roles that have yet to be concretely identified) and if he continues with that, then there could be a whole plethora of characters to draw from for the fourth movie. At one point in the comic books, the Green Goblin, Norman Osborn, was even a good guy, donning one of Iron Man’s suits and calling himself the Iron Patriot (pieces of this, including the star-spangled suit, were utilized for this summer’s wonderful “Iron Man 3“). In “Ultimate Spider-Man,” which “Amazing Spider-Man” draws a lot from, characters like Iceman (from “X-Men“) would regularly stop by – a few mutants even lived with Peter and Aunt May for a while. This is impossible given the rights issues, but a similar team dynamic, which Webb is hinting at, could be achieved. In fact, Webb seems to be purposefully working in new characters for potential usage later.
“You know, what was fun about the comics is that there’s an entire sort of encyclopedia of characters and stories and histories and nuances and idiosyncrasies and off-shoots,” Webb told Crave. “I think that that is something that seems to be really successful and has a lot of potential so it’s sort of, as yet, undefined, but intentionally so.”
We’ll undoubtedly know more before “Amazing Spider-Man 2” opens on May 2nd, 2014.