source:empireonline.com

Empire has reported that 500 Days of Summer director Marc Webb will helm the next Spide-Man movie

He's been seen as the surprise frontrunner in most of the rumour stories ever since Sam Raimi left the Spider-franchise, but Marc Webb, the director of (500) Days Of Summer, has been officially announced as the man to make the next Spider-Man movie.

Mere hours after New York Magazine's Vulture blog broke the first inkling of an official deal, Sony and Marvel have confirmed the news with a statement.

This is a dream come true and I couldn't be more aware of the challenge, responsibility, or opportunity. Sam Raimi's virtuoso rendering of Spider-Man is a humbling precedent to follow and build upon," says the new man in Spider-Town

What may be slightly worrying to fans of our friendly neighbourhood Spider-Man out there is that the movie is budgeted at a slim $80 million (yes, that's slim these days, for a comic-book movie especially) suggesting that we're going to get a big helping of teen angst and a smaller helping of superheroic action. In fact, since it's also been reported that this film (and two planned sequels) will follow the Ultimate Spider-Man Marvel comics reboot, expect a heck of a lot more teen angst-ing and the usual - and familiar - hiding-superpowers-in-high-school thing than we've seen from this franchise before.

He's cheaper, and he's already proved he can work with stories that involve young people (even if his romantic comedy drama didn't feature high school-age folk). We're not so sure about how he'll handle the action, but he can soon prove himself, and he'll have a lot of help. Oh, and then there's the name. Spider-Man just had to go to a guy named Webb, right

Oh, and since the script does, as rumoured, return the character to high school age, don't expect him to try to put Summer star Joseph Gordon-Levitt into Peter Parker's costume. We can expect a cast comprised almost entirely of unknowns, it seems, which might help keep the budget squeezed down to a minimum