Down in Culver City

I spent most of the morning at fabled Sony Pictures Animation/Imageworks, where company staffers updated me on Sony doings.

There's a bunch of different films in various stages of development at SPA. There's the Smurfs project (live-action and animation), and the third installment of Open Season that's moving briskly along (production being done by Reel Effects in Dallas, same as the second picture). And Hotel Transylvania is in some development transitions.

"We're reworking the story, stripping it down. We had too many characters and too many plot lines. Management told board artists to board exactly what was in the latest cript and then weren't too happy with the result. We spent some long days going through sequences and restructuring, and we're still going through sequences ..."

Another staffer said to me, "This isn't brain surgery, story construction isn't that complicated, but we've had a lot of managers come and go and it gets hard to figure out which each of them wants ..."

And over in the hybrid live action-animation department, there is this news about Spidey:

Marc Webb, the (500) Days Of Summer director, has climbed to the top of the Sony Pictures' list to rebirth the Spider-Man franchise. While the studio has a wish list of star directors like James Cameron, David Fincher, and Wes Anderson, the emergence of Webb as director comes as a huge surprise. But Mike Fleming's sources tell him Webb met about the Spidey reboot with the pic's producers and executives looking to get the picture into production later this year for a Summer 2012 release. ...

This morning, a Sony staffer who knows the departing Sam Raimi said to me:

"Sam really had an impossible task. They wanted a BIG production, and they wanted it for summer 2011. And Sam said, 'I can't do the picture you want for the budget you want. And I can't get all the effects shots done if they all go through Imageworks. I'll need more money and I'll have to go to other effects houses.' ..."

One artist said he thought Sony management gave Raimi and impossible task so that he would end up quitting. Idle speculation, of course. Movie execs never, never do that kind of thing, do they?