Up till now we’d all assumed Sam Raimi would be done with Spider-Man after number three. After all, he’s only committed for three films, and as Bryan Singer recently demonstrated, Hollywood directors have the attention span of a gadfly. A gadfly is a nasty creature used by God to assault the Egyptians, but quickly got bored with biting them and wandered off into the desert shortly thereafter.

No so with Raimi. The tentacle lovin director had this to say to SciFi Wire: “I've heard Amy Pascal [chairman of Sony's motion picture group] say she wants to make six Spider-Man pictures. So I think she's a woman of her word. And if she says there'll be six, there'll be six. ... If they were to ask me, and if I felt as passionate as I feel now about the character and had this great hunger and desire to tell the story, which I really do now, you couldn't keep me away from it.”

What this means is that Spider-Man could become the first superhero franchise to deliver more than three good films. X-Men certainly isn’t going to do it. Though odds are he’ll lose Tobey Maguire after #3, with Raimi at the helm the thing might still work. Nice to know he’s looking forward to more as much as we are.