Spider-Man 4 is nowhere near its May 2011 release, but Sony isn’t sitting around — the studio has hired James Vanderbilt to write the scripts for both Spider-Man 5 and Spider-Man 6 movies.

Vanderbilt wrote a draft for Spider-Man 4, but director Sam Raimi went out to David Lindsay-Abaire (Robots, Inkheart) for a rewrite on that, and then moved on to grab Gary Ross (Big, Pleasantville) for yet another rewrite.

While Raimi, Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst are all coming back for the fourth installment of the franchise, there have been occasions where it seemed like none would be coming back, so Sony is setting up for the long-haul with Vanderbilt as their screenwriter and fully-prepared to move on to a “franchise reboot” with a new director and stars if the others don’t come back for future chapters.

It’s being reported that Sony Pictures have hired Gary Ross to rewrite Spider-Man 4. Ross wrote, directed, and produced both Pleasantville and Seabiscuit — both which starred Tobey Maguire — and also wrote and produced Big and the upcoming new take on Creature From the Black Lagoon.

The writer is now the third man to be writing a draft of Spider-Man 4. Before him, David Lindsay-Abaire (Robots, Inkheart) wrote a draft, and then James Vanderbilt (Zodiac, The Rundown) wrote one as well. No word on if Ross will simply be working off what the previous two have put together or if he will be completely starting over with his script.

On one hand, it is a good thing that Gary Ross has written for Tobey Maguire twice before this. At the same time, those two films weren’t very similar to Spider-Man at all, which may cause one to worry. Naturally, director Sam Raimi will be closely watching the development of the script, so hopefully this all leads to good things.

Nikki Finke over at DHD is reporting that Sony has somehow re-obtained Tobey Maguire and Sam Raimi to do Spider-Man 4. Along with this also comes expectations that Kirsten Dunst will also be returning.

To go along with this, as previously reported, Sony is working on shooting a fifth movie at the same time, instead of waiting and risking losing the stars again. The plan is to do movies 4 and 5 in the very smart back-to-back method, assuring them a hell of a lot more money, so long as they make up for the slap of a third movie they put out.

This is an interesting turn-of-events as only recently, many names were being tossed around to claim the Spidey crown, but Sony stood tall saying they still wanted Maguire, and looky here, they pulled it off.