Marc Webb has finalized a deal to helm the new Spider-Man movie for Columbia.
The studio last week scrapped the fourth installment of the web-slinging hero under director Sam Raimi and star Tobey Maguire and decided to reboot and scale down the franchise.
While unlikely names such as James Cameron and David Fincher were floated (when was the last time those made a scaled-down movie?), Webb quietly rose to the top of the list of candidates.
Webb became a sought-after director with (500) Days of Summer, his comedic romancer for Fox Searchlight starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, earning him praise for the realistic way he portrayed a modern relationship.
Webb set up a series of projects since Summer, among them Age of Rage at Searchlight. It was his Fox projects that were major hurdles in the deal, as his next movie was expected to be for that company. Fox had to allow him to bow out of his commitment before a deal could be made with Columbia.
Webb, who has options on two sequels, will now tackle a Jamie Vanderbilt script that sees a Spider-Man movie that will look and feel very different from the big movies that went before it.
The plan for the movie is to be in the $80 million range and feature a cast of relative unknowns (so you can quash those Rob Pattinson or Gordon-Levitt rumors at this point). And the story will be pared down to center on a high school kid who is dealing with the knowledge that his uncle died even though the teen had the power to stop it.
The touchstone for the new movie will not be the 1960s comics, which were the inspiration behind the movies by Raimi, who grew on up on them, but rather this past decades Ultimate Spider-Man comics by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley where the villain-fighting took a back seat to the high school angst.
Avi Arad and Laura Ziskin are producing the new movie, which will begin production this year.
