Spider Man 4 has been all over the place recently, first with casting rumors of John Malkovich playing The Vulture and now Sony has said that they are completely scrapping the Raimi/Maguire series and starting fresh with a reboot.  Raimi walked after concerns over the script and schedule and Sony has hired script writer James Vanderbilt to write the reboot.  Sony says the new Spidey series will follow a Peter Parker who is still in high school and will have to deal with all the major teen concerns along with his super powered ones.  This sounds exactly like Ultimate Spider Man where Marvel restarted the series with revamped villains and making it more contemporary (Peter’s an intern on The Daily Bugle’s blog, for instance).  Spider Man 3 was a major disappointment but it seems a little early for a complete reboot.  We’ll have to wait to 2012 to see it.

*Updated* It’s been announced the (500) Days of Summer director Marc Webb has been tapped to helm the new reboot and the movie is supposed to arrive in the summer of 2012.

One of Spider Man’s biggest villains is gearing up for a spin off movie courtesy of Sony.  The co-writers of Zombieland, Paul Wernick and Rhett Reese, recently turned in a script to Sony and they’ll probably get things going fairly soon.  Venom has always been a popular villain/anti-hero in the comics universe but was pretty botched in the atrocious Spider Man 3.  Trying to cram the whole black costume Spidey to Eddie Brock/Venom story along with plots concerning Harry Osborne/New Goblin and Sandman just resulted in a big mess.  There aren’t any plot details about the Venom movie but Wernick mentioned he hopes that it connects up Spider Man 4 like the other Marvel movies are doing.  It’s also unknown if Topher Grace would come back to play Eddie Brock or if Sony would look for someone else. What would be awesome is if they could work Carnage in somewhere as well but if Spidey 3 is any indication, simpler is better.

In other Spidey news, Black mentioned that: “We’re just coming up with who the villain’s going to be now. We’ll be shooting in New York again. Trust me, people will appreciate who we pick, because it’ll be a big part of New York.”  The Internets have already started speculating and the big forerunners right now are The Kingpin, Kraven the Hunter and The Lizard as possible supsects.  The Kingpin was actually featured in the dreadful Daredevil and was played by Michael Clarke Duncan.  Kraven the Hunter could make an interesting villain but he doesn’t really have any big New York vibe about him.  Dr. Curt Connors aka The Lizard has already shown up in the Spidey movies as Peter’s college professor so that is probably a good guess as well.  I can think of a couple big villains that haven’t shown up yet like Hobgoblin, The Vulture, Carnage, Electro, Mysterio, Scorpion, Rhino and Shocker.  I also think the villain being the Sinister Six would be an awesome choice but seeing how they juggled three villain is Spidey 3 I wouldn’t be to optimistic about that.  Hopefully with Sam Raimi cleansing his pallete with “Drag Me to Hell” he can get Spider Man back on track.  Who do you think would be a good villain for Spider Man 4?  Let us know in the comments.