Fact: Spider-Man 3 was stupid – so stupid that if you put a hot iron in its hand and made a telephone noise it’d burn its own ear off.

But don’t think that Sam Raimi hasn’t learnt his lesson. He’s decided to make Spider-Man 4 intimidatingly cerebral in its complex exploration of themes like Oedipal desire, quantum immortality and the ethical ambiguity of human interpretations of good and evil.

Well, that’s what we assume, anyway. It’s been announced that the script for Spider-Man 4 will be penned by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. Great! We loved his play Rabbit Hole – especially the scene where, after wrestling with grief following the accidental death of her four-year-old son, the lead character dances the Twist with Kirsten Dunst, cooks some eggs and then pulls a funny face.

It’s easy to forget that Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2 had impressively deep themes. Spider-Man taught us that with great power comes great responsibility, and Spider-Man 2 taught us the sacrifices necessary to achieve greatness.

Then Spider-Man 3 came along and taught us that if you ever get covered in sticky black alien-jizz you’ll end up with hair like Pete Wentz. It rounded the trilogy off nicely, really.

But since then The Dark Knight has been released, and for the first time Spider-Man is playing catch-up. Audiences have moved on – they don’t want their superheroes to fight big sandy men and then dance with Ron Howard‘s daughter any more. Now they want their superheroes to wrestle joylessly with ethics, in the dark, while adopting a weird voice that sounds like a farting buffalo.

So, with that in mind, Spider-Man director Sam Raimi has decided to give 2011′s Spider-Man 4 a punt into the realms of the highbrow. He’s hired Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire to do the script, as MTV reports:

Apparently, “Spider-Man 4” has landed one heck of a screenwriter in Pulitzer Prize winner and playwright David Lindsay-Abaire. Since Lindsay-Abaire’s plays focus on (in his own words) “outsiders in search of clarity,” the choice suggests that Columbia wants a return to a character-driven “Spider-Man,” and a Peter Parker who struggles with his heroic powers.

We’re sad to say that this news has actually made us a little bit intrigued about Spider-Man 4. David Lindsay-Abaire’s plays are as universally acclaimed as they are high-minded, and this bodes really well for the movie. And if he remembers that nobody wants to see Kirsten Dunst again, we’re even happy to overlook the fact that David Lindsay-Abaire also co-wrote the low-rent animated 2005 Paula Abdul movie Robots.

But mostly we’re excited because it looks as if Spider-Man 4 will be far more intelligent than Spider Man 3. Don’t get us wrong, there’ll still be an excrutiating kitchen-based dance scene in the new movie, but this time the characters will be doing abstract interpretive jazz-ballet to Bartok’s Rhapsody Folk Dances for Violin and Orchestra No. 2.