Spider-Man 4 Catches A Scribe

By Emily McDonald: 2008-10-31 09:54:29

Columbia has made yet another unorthodox decision when it comes to screenwriters of the Spider-Man franchise. HR reports that playwright David Lindsay-Abaire will pen the script for Spider-Man 4 . Maybe he can undo what Spider-Man 3 did?

Lindsay-Abaire, who won the Pulitzer Prize, describes his plays as being “peopled with outsiders in search of clarity.” Sounds a lot like our Spider-Man, eh? For Spider-Man 4, the directing, star duo of Raimi and Maguire are both returning to the franchise with love interest, Kirsten Dunst, expected to be involved as well.

With a script already written for Spider-Man 4, and credited to James Vanderbilt on IMDB, this is a surprising announcement, indeed. With no regular screenwriter for the franchise, its hard to trust Marvel to pick a winner. Lindsay-Abaire is, at the very least, an interesting choice. Yes, the newly anointed Marvel screenwriter is best know for writing plays, but he has also written two screenplays, Robots and the upcoming, Inkheart. His Pulitzer- winning play, Rabbit Hole, chronicles a couple as they cope with the death of a child. It sounds like a real tearjerker. So what does a weepy playwright have in common with the man of the webs?

In a review of Rabbit Hole, The New York Times claims that “Mr. Lindsay-Abaire established himself as a lyrical and understanding chronicler of people who somehow become displaced within their own lives… A sprawling sense of whimsy and the grotesque has hitherto been Mr. Lindsay-Abaire's most conspicuous hallmark, with characters who suffer from extreme and exotic medical conditions, like amnesia or premature aging.” I believe that doing “all the things that a spider can” would qualify as an “extreme and exotic medical condition.”

Due to the fact that Spider-Man 3 was widely considered a failure, there is a lot riding Spider-Man 4. Panned by critics and mildly tolerated by fans, the script was pretty much a pig sty. It pulls from too many story lines, doesn’t give enough background for new villains and has The Sandman crying for redemption in the end. And don’t even get me started about that Peter Parker as a pimp in dancing-shoes scene. It’s obvious that this playwright was chosen as a way to re-focus the franchise on the characters populating the Spider-Man universe. In order for the fourth sequel to regain the footing of the overarching story, there is going to have to be some good old fashioned likable characters with conceptually authentic story-lines.

Marvel is hardly hurting for another victory. With Iron Man being a wild success and so many characters from the Marvel ‘verse being greenlit for films, they are most certainly not feeling any pain. I just hope that the newest flick is everything Spider-Man fans hope it will be, and that they can someday heal and learn to forget what was Spider-Man 3.

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