Though it’s still not on par with The Avengers as far as “massive blockbuster hits based on Marvel Comics properties,” The Amazing Spider-Man is doing quite well. According to Sony’s numbers, the film has pulled in a little under $60 million in its first two official days in US theaters. More impressively, the $23.4 million of that total earned by the film on July 4 is the second highest amount ever pulled in by a film on Independence Day, behind only Michael Bay’s first Transformers movie. It’s now estimated that the film’s first week total should be between $120 and $130 million.

So, what does a major movie studio like Sony Pictures do when it has a massive hit on its hands based on a third-party intellectual property with over half a century of canonical backstory to mine? Why, it immediately ramps up work on a trilogy, of course!

“It’s finally here,” exclaims a post on the film’s official Facebook page. “The Amazing Spider-Man is the first installment in a movie trilogy that will explore how our fave hero’s journey was shaped by the disappearance of his parents.”

Though we’ve known for quite some time that Sony was keen on getting an Amazing Spider-Man sequel underway — the studio started work on a script before the first Amazing Spider-Man hit theaters — this Facebook notice is the first we’ve heard of a planned trilogy. So far there’s no information on the still-hypothetical plot points of Amazing Spider-Man 2 or 3, nor any official confirmation that Andrew Garfield or Emma Stone would return to reprise the roles of Peter Parker/Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy, respectively.

That said, it seems quite likely that Sony was concocting this plan from the moment it opted to launch a Spider-Man film into production. Trilogies generate huge amounts of cash, usually measured in the billions of dollars, and few things lend themselves as well to a trio of movies like the massive amount of pre-existing backstory found in superhero comics. We imagine that the firm had dozens of tentative ideas of what to do in the second and third Amazing Spider-Man films well in advance of this first movie’s debut, but were coyly keeping it all to themselves until The Amazing Spider-Man proved a success (or, at least, generated sufficient hype among fans).

Now that we know that two more Spidey flicks are on the way, it’s only fair to begin rampant speculation on what they might include. The Vulture? Rhino? Mysterio? Sony would probably like to avoid throwing Venom into the mix, if only to avoid repeating Sam Raimi’s efforts, but what about Carnage? Spidey has to have symbiote problems at some point, so why not make a film loosely based on the Maximum Carnage storyline? Granted, it’s totally a product of the 1990s (superfluous pouches and all), but hey, at least it’s not The Clone Saga, right?

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