Recently, Sam Raimi, Kirsten Dunst, and Tobey Maguire pulled out of the upcoming Spiderman 4 movie. The movie, to begin shooting in February, was scrapped when the director, Raimi, pulled out, citing scheduling problems as well as problems with the script. It seems that Maguire and Dunst followed the director (Raimi) in his abandonment of the production. Sony Pictures is none too happy, but has planned for this contingency.

Spiderman 4 will still be released, but will likely be a “reboot” written by James Vanderbilt. It will be a story of a high-school Peter Parker and Mary Jane. It will be interesting to see how the time line works out, considering that Pete was bitten by a radioactive spider pretty late in high-school. Vanderbilt has worked on such blockbusters (insert sarcasm here) as Darkness Falls, Basic, The Rundown, Zodiac, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, and The Losers.

Raimi will instead be working on the movie adaptation of the game World of Warcraft. More precisely, Raimi will be working on a movie to take place in the Warcraft universe. Rumor has it that the movie will be produced by Legendary Pictures, the studio that brought us The Dark Night and 300.

I think that the Spiderman franchise has been slowly weakening since the second movie came out. The third movie was pretty bad, I thought, and Raimi is capable of much better.

Whatever happens, it will be interesting to see if Bruce Campbell (star of the Evil Dead trilogy) will have a cameo in the World of Warcraft movie, as he had in each of the Spiderman movies.