STICKING TOGETHER WEB OF FRIENDS CONSIDER SPIDEY'S FUTURE.

Byline: Bob Strauss

Film Writer

Could this be the end of Spidey?

Not too likely, considering that "Spider-Man 3's" advance ticket sales are through the roof and the worldwide want-to-see factor for the new black-suited webslinger is amazingly high.

But there are indications that, despite Sony Pictures' recent declaration that there will be a "Spider-Man 4," "5" and "6," the friendly neighborhood hero as movie audiences have come to know him may have spun his last yarn.

Key players Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst's three-picture contracts are up, as is director Sam Raimi's, and all three are acting coy about their interest in a fourth Spidey saga.

Additionally, depending on whose numbers you believe, "Spidey 3" cost somewhere between $250 million and $300 million, an outlandish sum even considering that the 2002 "Spider-Man" brought in $822 million and its 2004 sequel $784 million.

Then there's the fact that "Spidey 3" has a certain sense of finality to it. Many long-festering issues get resolved, the youthful protagonists reach some very definite maturity, and there's the most significant funeral in one of these things yet.

"I don't like talking too much about what happens at the end of the movie," says Maguire, who plays the teenage dweeb Peter Parker, who gained great powers and great responsibilities when he was bitten by a radioactive spider. "But I do think that there are a lot of story lines concluded in this film that were in process through the other movies."

"I think this definitely is the end to this trilogy, that we've closed this chapter," adds Dunst, whose Mary Jane Watson first fell in love with the masked wall-crawler and later found out he was her nice, nerdy neighbor. "But no, we haven't had that 'this is over' discussion among ourselves yet."

That said, all three principals indicate that any return to the Marvel Comics universe would have to be some kind of group decision.

Dunst is adamant that she simply won't make a fourth movie without Maguire and Raimi. For his part, the headliner has more specific demands.

"A great script with a story that was fresh and unique and worth telling," Maguire says would be the first requirement. "Part of that is that there would have to be something new for Peter Parker, some new territory to cover. And Sam would have to be involved, the right cast would have to be there. At that point, I'd be willing to consider it."

Raimi echoes the story-is-king viewpoint. He says that the hardest part of making "Spider-Man 3" was not the enormous amount of visual effects required for the shape-shifting new villain Sandman (played by Thomas Haden Church) or the physics-defying aerial sequences with other bad guys Venom (Topher Grace) and the New Goblin (trilogy mainstay James Franco), but deciding just how far to go with Spidey/Peter's newly pronounced dark side.

But that, it's evident, was also the most rewarding thing the writer-director did. And something at least as dramatic would have to happen if he came back yet again.

"If there was a great story to tell, and I felt I had a really good take on where the character could grow to now, then I think it would be great," Raimi says of a possible No. 4. "But I'd have to have a tremendous passion to do it. So many people love Stan Lee's character that, if I didn't think that I could do it fantastically, then I should step aside and let a younger director who loves the character come in."

That, of course, will inevitably happen at some point.

As Avi Arad, the former head of Marvel Comics and one of the film series' producers points out, writer Lee and artist Steve Ditko created Spider-Man in 1962, and the character has thrived in one form or another ever since.

An aging superhero 

"You have to look at this as Spider-Man is 45 years old," Arad notes. "He's been in so many mediums: animation, comic books, graphic novels, maybe Broadway (Julie Taymor and Bono are collaborating on a stage musical), video games. So the character is bigger than all of us. And while we would rather continue, of course, with the same team we have been together with for a long time, the fact is that the character will endure. Spider-Man's survived Marvel's bankruptcies, bad economies, you name it. And it's around and alive and bigger than ever."

It's also as sure as anything can be in the movie business that the Spidey franchise will survive the second sequel's enormous price tag. But if "Spidey 3" doesn't meet commercial expectations, and if the costs of making future installments increase for the same inevitable reasons that this one's did over the prior two, then an end truly could come.

Another of the films' producers, Laura Ziskin, explains the economics as best she can. Or, at least, as much as she's willing to.

"Obviously, the theatrical box office is just one part of the revenue stream for these movies," Ziskin points out. "So I think the studio sees the investment in the movie as a sound one, even though the numbers sound so crazy. They sound crazy to us, too. But when you look at it relative to what the potential return is and what the return has been historically, it's a sound investment.

"With each successive year, though, the cost goes up," she acknowledges.

"For this one, there was a cost-of-living increase, but not a huge one. The biggest increase in the budget, which I think you see reflected in the movie, was in the visual effects. Sam's appetite, and I believe the audience's appetite, demanded that. I don't think that we could put out a third movie and say, 'We're going to give you less than we gave you the last time.' "

In the meantime, Raimi may be pondering a lucrative offer from somewhere else.

New Line Cinema head Bob Shaye, who has announced that he refuses to work again with "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson (the split, of course, is over money issues), is reportedly thinking of Raimi to direct a film of J.R.R. Tolkien's other Middle-earth novel, "The Hobbit."

Raimi says, though, that he's not about to jump out of the web into that situation right away.

"It would be more complicated than that," the filmmaker says. "I'd have to know how Bob and Peter Jackson are going to resolve their conflicts. Then I'd have to know that Peter Jackson is OK with it.

And then I'd have to think it was the right picture for me. And THEN I'd have to know that I don't want to do 'Spider-Man 4.' "

Strong attachment

And how much would these guys want to make another Spidey, really?

"It would be very hard to say goodbye to Spidey," Raimi admits.

"I love working with all the people, the cast and Sam and all that," Maguire enthuses. "I would hope to work with them again, whether it was on one of these or not. And I'm sure, at some point, I'll have reminiscent, sentimental kinds of feelings about my experiences on the films. I already do. I've had great times."

"We are all passionate for this franchise," Dunst concludes. "All of us want to make a great movie. Obviously, it's about box office for the studio at the end of the day, somewhere. But we don't want to produce just to produce. These characters, these people, are so important to us."

Bob Strauss, [phone]

[e-mail]

Putting the sand in Sandman

'Spider-Man 3" villain The Sandman can turn himself into a rock-hard wall, a sea of porous particles, a gritty cyclone and just about any other consistency and shape sand can achieve.

Thomas Haden Church, who plays the tortured, mutated thief, is a pretty good actor. But not that good. To achieve Sandman's many morphings, computer technology by the truckload was required.

"We had hundreds of people, visual-effects artists, working on this problem," director Sam Raimi says of digitally creating convincing-looking, workable screen sand. "We had to create the sand in the computer, but first we had to understand what sand was. So, we spent nine days photographing sand.

"How does it fall? We had to dump tons of it. How does it interact? ... How does it stack?

"Once we understood it in as many ways as we could, we had the artists start to re-create it in a computer. This was teams of technicians and code writers and colorists and just computer geeks, all typing in a keyboard and trying to create that thing that's a grain of sand.

"Then we had to harness the powers of tremendous computers tied together to be able to manipulate millions of these things at once. And the computers kept crashing because of all the information we were putting into them."

Even then, Raimi says, they couldn't make all of the sand the production needed anyway. Sets had to be dusted with loads of practical particles, too.

One problem with that, though ...

"As you can imagine, actual sand is very heavy and dangerous to work with in the large quantities we did," producer Grant Curtis explains.

"One of the early things we did was to look at the different types of sand that were available and the different substitutes for sand.

"Ground corncobs was, fortunately, one of the things we found early. It was a huge help to our production."

And to Curtis' skin, eyes, lungs, etc. -- he plays one of "Spider-Man 3's" armored-car guards who gets buried in the stuff.

-- B.S.

CAPTION(S):

4 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) WELCOME TO THE DARK SIDE

(2 -- 3 -- color) no caption ("Spider-Man 3")

(4) Spider-Man battles his computer-assisted, shape-shifting enemy, The Sandman.