Source: ‘Amazing Spider-Man 4′ May Not Be ‘Just a Spider-Man Movie,’ Webb Teases

Almost from the minute he joined the franchise, director Marc Webb made it clear he wanted to make a new Spider-Man trilogy. He’ll get his wish, albeit with a bonus: Sony announced release dates for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 4 last month, nearly a year before the second installment arrives in theaters.

How does having a fourth Spider-Man film change the director’s overarching plans? It’s possible that it doesn’t. Speaking with Crave Online, Webb suggested something very interesting about the nature of that mysterious Spider-Man 4.

“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,” he said. “I think the fourth movie, what we’ve discovered is that 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. It might not just be a Spider-Man movie.”

What exactly does that mean? Might we see other heroes from the Spider-Man universe, like clone Ben Reilly or even the antihero Kane Parker, make an appearance? Without going into specifics, Webb made it clear that he’s keen on the whole history of the wall-crawler, not just recent history like Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man films, as a source of inspiration.

“You know, what was fun about the comics is that there’s an entire sort of encyclopaedia of characters and stories and histories and nuances and idiosyncrasies and off-shoots,” he said. “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.”

Cool.