Thomas Haden Church, Spider-Man 3's Sandman, has let slip that there’s talk of Sam Raimi doing Spider-Man 4.
Take this with the largest grain of salt you can find (we suggest rock salt for a rumour of this size) but there’s talk this morning that a Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man 4 could be in development at Sony. We all know that Raimi’s popular trilogy (featuring Tobey Maguire) was set to receive a fourth instalment before being nixed by Sony in favour of a rebooted take featuring Andrew Garfield as the beloved webhead.
The story has emerged via the Sandman himself, Thomas Haden Church, who appeared in Raimi’s trilogy-capping Spider-Man 3. Church told Comicbook.com that “there’s always been some kind of…I’ve heard rumours…that Sam Raimi was going to do another [Spider-Man movie] with Tobey [Maguire] and if that happens, I would probably campaign to maybe at least do a cameo.”
The key to this story’s accuracy really depends on where Church heard those rumours.
In the wake of the wildly popular Spider-Man: No Way Home, the reappearance of both Maguire and Garfield’s take on Spider-Man caused a raft of chatter and rumour about Sony considering returns for both/either version of the wall crawler. If it’s those rumours Church is referring to, then this story doesn’t offer anything particularly new.
However, if Church has heard something more recent or heard something from an insider source, perhaps this report has some juicier substance to it.
We know that Sony’s ownership of the character depends upon them putting a new Spider-Man film into production every three or so years, and with the Spider-Verse trilogy coming to an end next year (although it’s unclear if animated films count in this contract arrangement) and the studio pausing to assess where to take Tom Holland’s series next, you can see the business reasons for returning to a different Spider-Man that surfs the wave of nostalgia.
Either way, the story has been hungrily picked up by all the trades, but only time will tell if it’s true. We would love to see Church get another crack at a Spider-Man film though. Of all the villains Raimi created across his trilogy, the Sandman was one of the most memorable. We’ll bring you more as we hear it.
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