Could There Be a Spider-Man 4?

From the birth of the first film, the word trilogy has defined the biggest and best superhero movie franchise today; "Spider-Man." Plenty of superhero movies have done it or are doing it lately, like "X-Men," "Fantastic Four," and the new "Batman" films. Three is a good number, but four is the number of yesterday’s superhero franchises, like "Superman" and the old "Batman" films. Those were the big greats, the flagship characters of DC Comics that led it’s universe to silver screen greatness.

So why shouldn’t Spidey follow suit? Can’t he have a quadrilogy too? After all, he’s Marvel’s greatest pioneer, peaking their success after "Blade" and "X-Men" helped Marvel raise the bar, and then Spidey took it higher than ever before. According to SuperHeroHype, Sony Pictures is so excited about "Spider-Man 3," the supposed end of the trilogy (hence the word trilogy) and the studio is so happy with the extraordinary response to screening footage that they are talking "Spider-Man 4." Apparently, the fourth film is confirmed as going into development.

Who did not see this coming? And, who wouldn’t want to see it happen? These are the reasons that the studio has allegedly begun talks with David Koepp to pen "Spider-Man 4" to officially make a quadrilogy out of the biggest big screen superhero franchise to date. has more than earned his shot at a fourth movie, especially having earned an estimate of $1.6 billion worldwide between the first two movies. "Spider-Man" raked in the box office dough at $403 million domestic gross, and "Spider-Man 2" raked in just slightly less at $373 million domestic.

But, here’s the billion dollar question; will Tobey Maguire be back? As early as "Spider-Man 2" there was talk that Maguire was losing interest and motivation to continue with the trilogy. Now, with talks of a fourth movie, when he and other cast members have spoken about being done with "Spider-Man" after "Spider-Man 3," where does that leave number four? The possibility of losing Maguire already caused an uproar when he wasn’t sure he would continue with the role. Rumors flew long ago that Jake Gyllenhaal might replace Maguire as the webcrawler, but now any replacement would seem twice as misplaced and disappointing. If Sony wants to do "Spidey 4," all I can say is that I hope they have all the right people back on board, or else a mighty ship could sink awfully fast.