Marc Webb has clearly been paying attention to the long-game approach being taken over at Marvel Studios, with the director discussing how his plan for Spider-Man might pan out in a fourth film and beyond.
Webb concedes that the new iteration of the series was initially conceived as a trilogy, but suggests that a fourth film might be more expansive in scope, making it "not just a Spider-Man movie".
"I think this was conceived of as a trilogy," says Webb, "so there was a defined architecture to the story we were telling and we had sort of a rough outline of what was going to happen."
"I think [ for ] the fourth movie, what we’ve discovered is there are so many ancillary characters, that have enormous, cinematic potential that there may be other ways to exploit those characters, in a way that is exciting and fun and worthwhile. It might not just be a Spider-Man movie."
"You know, what was fun about the comics is that there’s an entire sort of encyclopaedia of characters and stories and histories and nuances and idiosyncrasies and off-shoots. I think that that is something that seems to be really successful and has a lot of potential."
Given the number of new characters being introduced in the next episode alone, it certainly seems as though Webb is keen to build a movie universe with a depth comparable to the source material.
We'll have to wait and see how those plans pan out, but in the meantime, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will open in the UK on 18 April 2014.
