The next live-action Spider-Man film is said to be shooting in September, and there’s another rumour that Sam Raimi is going to direct it.

Following a report earlier this week that Marvel and Sony’s sequel to Spider-Man: No Way Home is to begin filming this September, along comes a new rumour that Sam Raimi is stepping in as director. If true, it’d be a popular choice given that he made such a successful – even genre-defining – Spider-Man trilogy of his own from 2002 onwards.

The latest whisper comes to us via World of Reel, which reports that Raimi is “in contention” to direct the upcoming film, with the other directors in the running said to be Marvel regular Jon Favreau, and John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein – directors of last year’s cheerfully entertaining fantasy Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves.

This isn’t the first time Raimi’s name has been brought up in connection to Spider-Man in recent weeks. In March, actor Thomas Haden Church – who played Sandman in Spider-Man 3 – floated the possibility that he, Raimi and Tobey Maguire might reunite for another Spidey film.

Both Marvel and Sony have a financial interest in shoving a new Spider-Man movie through the pipeline. Spider-Man: No Way Home made close to $2bn in 2021 – a phenomenal sum that neither studio has come close to matching with their more recent superhero output. Marvel’s highly-anticipated Deadpool And Wolverine, out in July, potentially could; Sony’s Spider-Man-adjacent Kraven The Hunter (August) probably won’t.

Read more: Spider-Man: No Way Home review | Exhilarating, messy, fan-pleasing

The bigger question is whether the studios will continue to push for a late September shoot date, given the production doesn’t appear to have a director or even a finished script as yet. Word is that Sony and Marvel are at odds over what direction the next Spider-Man should go in, with the former wanting more multiverse shenanigans and the latter pushing for something more grounded.

Then again, Marvel has started production on movies without a finished script before (hello, Iron Man), and recent history has shown that directors will hop on board a major project mere weeks before filming if the conditions are right – see Gareth Edwards and his upcoming Jurassic film, which goes before cameras in July.

If the rumour’s true, we should be hearing an official confirmation of Raimi’s Spider-Man soon. We’ll keep you posted.