spiderman-sandman

Take this news with a grain of salt because it’s a rumor that came from a blog — or snort the salt, take a tequila shot, and squirt the lime in your eye — but IESB claims they have it on good authority that Spider-Man 4 is on hold indefinitely.  The reason?  Sam Raimi and Sony can’t agree on a villain.

Raimi is pushing hard for the Vulture to be the big baddie, something he also pushed for in the third film. Vulture was to do his evil deeds alongside the new Goblin and Sandman. Vulture and Flint Marko (Sandman) would have been cellmates who escaped together, with Vulture pressuring the more passive Marko into committing crimes.
On the flip side, our source says Sony seems to only be interested in featuring which ever character is selling books right now but basically they have no idea, just not the Vulture.
Oh, and the film is known as SPIDER-M4N within the production offices so take note!

Sandman was the lamest villain Spider-Man ever fought (the best? Doctor Octopus by a mile), so I don’t know why they’d want to bring him back [update: yes commenters, my bad, they were only talking about Raimi's original idea for Spidey 3].  He’s basically Meatwad from Aqua Teen.  But in either case, in a just world, Sam Raimi could tell Sony, “Hey, did you just call it ‘SPIDER-M4N’?  Here, go play with this ball of string while the adults write a movie.”