Continue Reading Below Advertisement

Here's the way superhero trilogies work: Spider-Man shows us Spider-Man's origins. Spider-Man 2 shows us the side effects and consequences of choosing to be a superhero, and our Spidey is forced to question whether or not being Spider-Man is worth all of the sacrifices he has to make. Spider-Man 3 shows us that, yes, it is worth it. That's just the pattern of superhero movies. Following that structure is a natural impulse, and while Spider-Man 3 was mostly bloated and shitty, it wasn't off base or misguided as far as trilogy structure goes.

Since the first three Raimi Spider-Man movies fulfilled all of the requirements that all superhero movies have, we know that a fourth Spider-Man movie would have one goal and one goal only: telling a badass story.

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

By the fourth film, we KNOW who Spider-Man is, we know who his friends are, and we know what the stakes of his world are. There is no reason for additional exposition. We would have already gone through Spider-Man's hero journey; we can't have him go through a SECOND origin, and to have him again question whether or not he wants to be a superhero would be redundant. There's nothing left to do except tell a fun, stand-alone Spider-Man story.

The worst thing about Marc Webb's The Amazing Spider-Man was that we had to start from scratch again, with Spider-Man's origin. At least with Raimi's franchise we were done with all of that. The only thing that we would get out of a fourth Raimi Spider-Man was a badass Spidey story, and wouldn't that be great?!

Continue Reading Below Advertisement

I think so, anyway, but that's because I dream about Spider-Man every single night and have come up with a Spider-Man movie that addresses all of the points that, in my head, make up a good Spider-Man movie. My Spider-Man 4 starts with Spidey getting framed for the murder of a high-profile politician (let's say he's framed by a gritty, more realistic version of Mysterio, who, in my movie, is less of a theatrical mastermind and more of a brilliant hacker/scam artist). The frame-up is so good and the evidence is so damning that even Mary Jane questions Spider-Man's innocence, so he goes on the run, and because he's too smart and fast to be caught by normal means, the police have to bring in a special outside consultant: Kraven the Hunter. Kraven is called in because he's better at tracking than anyone on the planet, and Spider-Man spends the entire movie either on the run or trying to clear his name.