SPOILER UPDATE AT THE END OF THIS ARTICLE!
I thought that Spider-Man 3 was finished shooting in New York City, but it turns out I was wrong – yesterday Sam Raimi and crew were at the main branch of the New York Public Library, a location you may remember from the first film, when Uncle Ben drops Peter off to “do homework” and he actually goes wrestling.
Professional paparazzi from WireImage were there, and they caught some interesting pictures – Thomas Haden Church acting with Cliff Robertson and Michael Pappajohn. That means there’s a scene in Spider-Man 3 with Sandman, Uncle Ben and the carjacker who killed Uncle Ben. Obviously this is a dream sequence, but what does it mean? Is Peter reluctant to take on Sandman and Uncle Ben returns in his dreams to remind him why he’s fighting crime in the first place? Or maybe it’s a flashback and that carjacker wasn’t working alone. I know some of you have access to this script, so pipe up! Clear up this mystery.
For more pictures from the Library shoot, including Aunt May and that infamous Raimi car, click here.
SPOILER UPDATE: I have been contacted with some interesting information – it seems that the scene at the Library isn’t a dream but is in fact a flashback, and the scene shows us that it wasn’t the carjacker from the first film who killed Uncle Ben, but rather Flint Marko, aka Sandman. The carjacker was just an accomplice.
Without having seen the film or read the script, I will say that this is a little disappointing – while I appreciate Raimi’s urge to tie Spidey’s villains into his life somehow, surely the symbiote and Harry Osborn fill that need for the third film? Did we really need to find out that Sandman is intimately involved in Spidey’s origins?