While regular Nikki Finke readers know she don't do geek, you'd be forgiven for assuming from today's column that she occasionally dabbles in dweeb: Watch as she churns a Spidey Wiki's worth of Peter Parker biographical material cross-referenced with the latest villain indexes into the mother of all Spider-Man 4 exclusives, its vital insider information fed to her in the basement of a Century City parking structure by an anonymous figure known only as Deep Flack.
The basics:
· Spider-Man 4, based on a screenplay by Zodiac writer Jamie Vanderbilt, is a go, with Sam Raimi and Tobey Maguire on board.
· Kirsten Dunst's character is in the script, but hasn't yet signed on.
· The "black costume" won't return.
· They may shoot 4 and 5 back-to-back.
As for villains, well, we'll leave you now to Finke's capable deductive services:

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George Lucas is still traumatized by the sullen faces of Star Wars fans who filed out of the first preview screenings of The Phantom Menace, and, spotting its jittery director standing by the exit, spit, "You ruined Christmas, my childhood, and Life Day!" before whipping their crumpled comments cards at his head. So it's not terribly surprising to learn that the producer of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is taking a far more tempered, "Hey, Indy fans: Let's just try to remember this is just a movie...and the originals weren't even that great to begin with!"-approach to his latest revisiting of a devoutly worshiped franchise:

"When you do a movie like this, a sequel that's very, very anticipated, people anticipate ultimately that it's going to be the Second Coming," Lucas says.

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Step Up, the "you got your hip-hop chocolate in my classically trained ballet peanut butter!" teen dance movie, and its sequel, Step Up 2: The Streets, have both done brisk business at the box office, so its not surprising that another sequel should already be in the works. But while we feared that their choice to go the alphanumeric pun-title route would perhaps limit the third installment creatively (a lively spitballing session from our beloved commenters threw out such possibilities as Step Up 3 Men and a Little Lady and Step Up 3 Days of the Condor), never once did the most obvious possibility occur to us: Step Up 3-D!

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