Unless Sony talks him into doing a fourth one, Sam Raimi should finally have some free time after Spider-Man 3 opens next summer. IGN says he may spend it resurrecting the heroes of forgotten pulp novels.

Raimi is planning to make a movie about several of the heroes made famous in Street and Smith Publications, a New York City publisher from the early twentieth century which specialized in dime adventure novels about heroes like Doc Savage, The Avenger, and The Shadow as well as various crime and Western books. Sam is spearheading a project which will take several of those characters put them in the same film.

At the least, Raimi is producing it. Whether he’ll direct it remains unknown. Again, there’s Spidey 4 to consider. If Sam doesn’t do it, the chances that he’ll direct this instead increase.

Of those characters, The Shadow at least, has been done before in a 1994 movie starring Alec Baldwin. The Shadow was a flop, but it’s visually stunning and any movie in which Alec Baldwin says “I dreamed I tore all the skin off my face and was somebody else underneath” can’t be all bad. It might good to see the character again.