That Guy From Wings Must Break You

Hey guys, it's Donnie...In an interview over the summer, James Franco mentioned that Spider-Man 3 would be doing some initial principal photography for a few weeks in November before they began filming the majority of the film next year. Well, November has arrived, and thusly Sony has treated us to our first image of Thomas Hayden Church as Flint Marko, the human persona of The Sandman, and I have to say that it's pretty damn great. Click on the image on the right to see it a bit larger and look below to compare to the comic character. Not a bad resemblance, eh?

We won't see any effect shots of him for a good long while, but this image is reassuring to say the least. Church got frickin' jacked for this role and I think he looks great. Now all we need is to see a little Topher Grace decked out in slobbery blackness, although apparantly there are still those who insist that Grace will be playing Electro. I would disregard them as raving loons, except I find it rather curious that Sony has still yet to confirm or deny the remarks by Kirsten Dunst saying that the villains will be Sandman, Venom and Hobgoblin.

I also find it interesting that there are rumors going around that Raimi is actually filming a third AND a fourth film back to back LOTR style. As far as I know, Raimi, Macguire, Dunst and Franco are all contracted for no more than three films and I'm pretty sure they've all gone on record as saying that they currently have no plans to stretch it to four unless there's some incredibly compelling idea behind the fourth film. Personally, I think I'd like to see the Venom story spread out over two films, especially if he's gonna be sharing the screen with Sandman and Hobgoblin. If there's anything that we should have learned from Joel Schumacher, it's that the more villains you have, the less interesting each of them becomes...