Spider-Man 4: story that never will be spills out

Indie Movies has been following the saga of Spider-Man 4 for so long that it was with a sense of deep emotional loss that we reported on the collapse of the project in its Sam Raimi-directed/Tobey Maguire-starring form last week. Now as a final relationship postscript, like the mournful collection of the last box of stuff from an ex-lover's flat, the proposed storyline of that defunct movie seems to have emerged.

Moviehole put us onto this (and, for now at least, we will refrain from commenting on the other strand of their story, linking abs-brandishing Twilight übermensch Taylor Lautner to the role of Peter Parker in the announced 2012-scheduled back-to-school reboot. We will simply shut our eyes, hum to ourselves and hope such smearing-one's-own-poop-up-the-walls madness cannot possibly come to pass), but the item originally appeared in New York magazine's entertainment strand. Just to recap, the rumour has been that director Sam Raimi parted ways with Sony over Spider-Man 4 because he loathed the proposed storyline. Which, when you see the plot laid out bare in front of you, seems a fairly understandable reaction. According to the synopsis provided by NY, the movie would have run something like this:

Peter Parker finally splits with Mary Jane Watson and hooks up with a new lady love (presumably named Felicia Hardy, if all the female casting speculation from last year was worth so much as a red cent). However Parker learns that the father of his new sweetheart is the feathered super-criminal known as the Vulture (who would have been played by John Malkovich). Spider-Man and the Vulture clash and the latter is promptly sent packing to the great big birdcage in the sky. Daughter Vulture is not pleased with this (in truth, it probably is quite a relationship faux paus to end the corporeal existence of your beloved's poppa. Although it worked out well for Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers), and she ditches Parker faster than the airspeed velocity of an unladen African swallow. Peter Parker is distraught and decides to abandon his superpowers (can you abandon superpowers? Isn't that like abandoning having blue eyes?), and there apparently would have ended Spider-Man 4, in a downbeat Empire Strikes Back-kinda fashion.

Now Sony allegedly loathed this story, viewing it as a bit of a bummer, as well as being less than impressed with the thought of trying to market a middle-aged villain (oh the horror). Raimi was in contrast supposedly (surprisingly?) happy with the plot, but equally aware that the script was simply not there yet. With the make-do shortcomings of Spider-Man 3 still fresh in the mind, and that announced 2011 summer release date breathing down on the Drag Me to Hell director like an asthmatic heffalump making dirty phonecalls to a gymnasium, Raimi decided he would rather bail out than deliver another compromised Spider sequel (although NY also suggests Raimi was rocked by his viewing of Avatar, and felt that the Sony schedule would prevent him from delivering visuals that could effectively compete with Cameron's blue brainchild).

So there we are. That was Spider-Man 4. Gone, and soon to be forgotten. To be replaced by, well, not Spider-Man 4, that's for sure. When the teen-friendly Spider reboot does emerge in two years time, whatever it might be called, you can bet it will not feature any nasty digits in the title; evil prophets as they are of the law of diminishing sequel returns. No, the strong suspicion surely has to be that when the revamped adventures of Peter Parker finally hit the big screen, those studio marketing geniuses will have concluded - after many months of intensive focus group testing, naturally – that the title with the highest scores on both the recognition and memorability indexes is... Spider-Man.