Sony's confidence in The Amazing Spider-Man movies, under the stewardship of director Marc Webb, is clearly sizeable. The studio has The Amazing Spider-Man 2 earmarked for next year, and it's recently announced dates for The Amazing Spider-Man 3 and The Amazing Spider-Man 4, too.
The movies are basically going to keep coming, two years apart, through until 2018 at least. Marc Webb has been chatting to Movies.com, and he admitted that "the fourth one was a little bit of a surprise".
When asked if he'd be directing it, he said that "we always talked about there being a set of three movies, but there may be elements that expand outside Spider-Man that could fulfill that fourth movie". Appreciating we've not got the full context of that statement, it does sound as though Sony is more confident about it that Webb at the moment. Teasing that "if you pay attention to this movie that's coming out in May of next year, you may get a feeling and a sense of what's to come in the future", Webb said in the interview that the plan has always been to extend the movie's universe, and to "make a series of films that were interrelated and weren't purely episodic". We'll get some clues as to that when Sony takes some of the covers off The Amazing Spider-Man 2 at its Comic-Con panel which is due to take place today.
The full interview with Marc Webb can be found here.
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Elements outside of Spider-man? There are 700 issues of Amazing Spider-Man and well over a 1000 issues of Spider-man comics overall. Plenty of material.