'Spider-Man 4' abandons one web for another

By Sarah Sluis

After preliminary reports that Spider-Man 4 was falling apart, Variety announced today that director Sam Raimi and star Tobey Maguire are exiting the project. The kicker? Columbia Pictures already has another script in place that will relaunch Spider-Man as a teenager, leaving them with little to do but find new cast and crew.

In a world where sequels are often dragged out past their due date, becoming more expensive to make even as interest in the original concept wanes, I was impressed by this business decision. Not only did Columbia walk away from a project that had millions of dollars of sunk development costs, the studio had already hedged their bets by developing a script that wouldn't require their expensive director or star. I suspect that this alternative script might have been used as a bargaining chip to keep the demands of the cast and crew down (or it might have come from plots for Spider-Man 5 or 6, since the screenwriter was tasked with those scripts), but then was recognized as a viable project in its own right. The choice also seemed to be a perfect example of a management style that is now becoming part of business school curricula that emphasizes critical thinking over following through on pre-planned strategies.

The key to management success may be "thinking through

clashing priorities and potential options, rather than hewing to any

pre-planned strategy." A college dean happened upon the success of this approach when he interviewed his son's retiring principal. The principal made effective use of this kind of critical thinking, one the dean supposed had its only natural environment in the occupation of "a hotshot, investment bank-oriented star lawyer."

In the case of Spider-Man, in one corner you have proven talent that is more expensive but can be trusted to bring in a quality project with large returns. The talent is also your problem, because they have a lot of power, which was delaying the project--in the last report before the talent's exit, the project was at a standstill because no one could agree on a villain. In the other corner with the teenage Spider-Man project, you move up a re-launch that probably would have happened anyway, have more control over the project than the talent, and a smaller budget that will be easier to recoup. There's more risk, but you're still dealing with a franchise. That's a lot of high-octane decision-making going on, and Columbia ultimately chose the second option. Though both sides claimed an amicable parting, I can only wish I knew what happened behind closed doors. I'll have to settle for a rewatching of Vince Chase's attempt to land the role of superhero Aquaman in "Entourage," a worthy dramatization of the deal-making process.