Merrick here...

Coventry Telegraph recently spoke to Sam Raimi about a lot of things; of particular interest were his thoughts on how he'd approach SPIDER-MAN 4.

Raimi spoke about the comic book movie franchise in the print edition of DVD & Blu-ray Review. Asked about complaints that there were too many bad guys in Spider-Man 3, he responded: "I think having so many villains detracted from the experience. I would agree with the criticism."

So it sounds like there will be fewer foes in the next installment. Raimi said he had learned some new lessons and storytelling tricks from his recent horror flick Drag Me to Hell which was a smaller and more intimate production.

He said: "I think I've learned about the importance of getting to the point and the importance of having limitations, and I'm hoping to take that into a production where I'm actually allowed to explore with more of the tools to pull it off with a little more splendour.

"I hope I don't lose that edge that I've just found. That would be my approach to Spider-Man 4: to get back to the basics."

...says Coventry Telegraph HERE.

I'll never forget sitting in a press screening of SPIDER-MAN 3. At some point, roughly 40 minutes into the film, a brief wave of restlessness and confusion spread through the audience for reasons no one could quite understand in that moment. Then everyone settled down once more, and continued watching the movie.

About eight minutes later, the lights came up and an announcement was made: the theater had accidentally switched reels and we'd been watching the film out of order for a bit of time. Viewers had evidently become restless because they'd detected the point at which the film stopped making "sense". But the audience..approximately 70 seasoned media/entertainment types...were so disengaged that no one really noticed or cared.

Either that, or the movie made so little sense to begin with that the reels being out of order wasn't all that obvious. This later theory is substantiated by the crowd's reaction after the theater graciously relaunched the show from the beginning: people thought it was a more interesting movie, and was narratively bolder, when the reels were mis-sequenced. The final product didn't speak to them as well.

All of which really has nothing to do with Raimi's comments, other than to re-enforce the point that SPIDER-MAN 3 didn't play so well. It made a lotta money, but that doesn't mean it worked as storytelling. It's good to know Sam (apparently) has at least some sense of this. Makes me a bit more interested to see a fourth film in the series.