Watching the evolution between Spider-Man and Spider-Man 3, it was pretty clear what Spider-Man 4 would include.

There’d be about 400 baddies, for starters. And it’d be up to 17 hours long. And it’d be a musical. And all of Spider-Man’s emotions would be signposted by a change of haircut. And Kirsten Dunst would have completed her transformation from busty pin-up to Otzi The Iceman in a ginger wig. And, needless to say, it’d be worse than terrible. Yes, Spider-Man 4 was more or less a done deal.

But not any more. Sony has just decided to bin Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst and start Spider-Man 4 from scratch as a gritty teenage drama in a move rumoured to have the codename ‘Project Let’s Try And Make Something Even Worse Than Spider-Man 3‘.

You don’t need to be a professor of cinema to realise that Spider-Man 3 wasn’t very good. But, that said, we were still looking forward to seeing Spider-Man 4 next year.

Mostly, we were interested in seeing how Sam Raimi would solve all the seemingly insurmountable problems – like the bloat of the last film, the way that he’d have to balance the artistic integrity of the story with the commercial pressures of a $2.5 million studio franchise, the fact that Spider-Man is now close to 40 years old and Mary Jane is starting to look a little bit like Sam The World’s Ugliest Dog and the way that, since The Dark Knight, nobody likes their superheroes to have any fun any more.

But now we won’t get that chance. After a few weeks of frantic rumour-milling about budget and script problems, it’s been announced that Sam Raimi, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst have all been ditched from Spider-Man 4. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Spider-Man 4 will be rebooted to be more about teenagers and emotions and… hang on, that’s bad news too. Oh, this is no good at all. The LA Times reports:

Sony on Monday pulled the plug on the project as it was being conceived with director Sam Raimi after he told the studio he wasn’t comfortable moving forward with the sequel… The studio said it would hire a new star and director and re-boot the movie as a story about Parker’s early life as a “teenager grappling with contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.”

It isn’t all bad news, of course – Drag Me To Hell showed that Sam Raimi is much better when he’s allowed to muck about on his own, for instance, and if Tobey Maguire had carried on as Spider-Man for much longer then it would have meant eventually sitting through a tacked-on subplot about the creeping onset of osteoporosis. Plus, if the new Spider-Man 4 is going to be aimed at teenagers then it’ll be all about ringtones and impenetrable slang and Dappy out of N-Dubz and it’ll pass us by anyway.

So that’s something. Plus, don’t forget that if the new teenage Spider-Man 4 is going to be a reboot, then we’ll get to watch the series develop all over again. That means that Spider-Man 6 is going to be just as uniformly dreadful as Spider-Man 3 was. Oh, now you’re excited.

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