Drew Goddard is good news no matter what film you're announcing.
I would say that Goddard is one of the most interesting guys to come out of the recent wave of TV-writers-turned-feature-writers. He's also, simply because of the way things have worked out, one of the most untapped resources working today. So it is tremendous (if not terribly surprising) news that Sony is looking to him to write and direct their second major “Spider-Man” reboot.
Latino Review broke the news this morning, and it certainly matches what I've been hearing. I had not heard the rumor about them calling this new series “The Spectacular Spider-Man,” but I think that's both consistent with Sony's behavior so far and instantly enjoyable for fans. The things I've heard as well include casting an actual teenager in the part and one movie a year, and if they work that quickly, what i hope happens is they stop treating each film as something gigantic and instead focus on just telling interesting stories that are scaled more modestly.
After all, one of the things that defines Spider-Man is that he's a street-level superhero, a guy who will stop a purse-snatching or a bank robbery. His stories are interesting because of what happens to Peter Parker's life, not because he's fighting the biggest supervillains. I think one mistake they made with both of the Webb films is that they tried to make them feel like giant movies while telling relatively modest stories. If they're going to be making a Spider-Man film every year, you can tell the kinds of serialized personal stories that really pile on the difficulties for Peter, and you can show the way his villains play havoc with his life.
There are plenty of interesting details in the Latino Review report, including the idea that Iron Man may show up in the first of the Sony Spider-Man films. Since it looks like Marvel is definitely reverting to earlier drafts of “Civil War” that involved Spider-Man, making room for the character to make his debut in the third “Captain America” movie, I'm curious how they're going to carry over story threads from that movie into “The Spectacular Spider-Man,” or whatever they end up calling Goddard's first film.
Whatever the case, Sony's got to be excited about Marvel helping them get their biggest franchise back on track, and I'm curious to see how they adapt their pre-Marvel plans to what they end up doing in the next few years.
“The Spectacular Spider-Man” will most likely swing into theaters in the summer of 2017.