Is Tobey Maguire sick of money? He may be, if his comments to the Australian Courier-Mail newspaper are any indication. While Down Under to promote The Good German (of which he is the best part), Maguire said that he feels like Spider-Man is a trilogy and that it’s all been wrapped up as far as he’s concerned.
"To me it seems like this is a natural point for the team to break up because we have a lot of story conclusions that were going along for the main characters for the first two movies and we kind of tie almost everything up for the third movie," he said.
Kirsten Dunst has said the same thing to me in the past, although she’s tempered it with the old “If Sam comes back, I’ll come back.” I imagine that, if cornered, Tobey would give the same answer. But would Sam Raimi come back? If my sources are to be believed, Spider-Man 3 leaves plenty of room for Spider-Man 4… and in fact the finale may leave fans clamoring for it. But still, would anyone want to turn their career into nothing more than a Spider-Man factory? At the rate that these massive movies come out, Raimi has just about no time to do any other directing work in between, and I imagine that anyone would feel burnt out after spending the last seven years living in Spider-Man’s universe. That’s almost as long as Stan Lee was scripting The Amazing Spider-Man.
But don’t think Spider-Man 3 is the end. These films make too much money to stop them now, regardless of who is directing or starring in them. Once 3 is released and the dust settles is when my stomach starts tying itself into knots… into whose hands will Sony place my all-time favorite fictional character? Now that the Spider-Man comic books are unreadable pieces of shit I only have the movies to tide me over. And remember, Tobey tried to talk tough before making Spider-Man 2 and Sony almost got Jake Gyllenhaal to replace him – Tobey had to come back begging for his job. Maybe he’s laying the groundwork for some negotiations.
By the way, check back here at 10 on the dot, Eastern time, when we’ll have a report from a presentation on the Sony lot this weekend, where Sam Raimi and Avi Arad showed seven minutes of Spider-Man 3 footage.