My travels in Los Angeles took me to Las Vegas tonight where I managed to get into Sony's special presentation at the ShoWest exhibitors conference for "Spider-Man 2". Along with appearances by the cast and crew, the half hour sneak peek contained three quite cool elements:

The New Trailer
The new domestic trailer is still being assembled and will debut in cinemas April 9th, but we got a sneak peek. After the quite limp teaser, its very pleasing to say quite simply this preview ROCKED - literally the best full trailer of a Summer movie yet. The first half deals with Peter (Tobey Maguire) being sick of his identity and ditching his superhero identity (literally his costume in a trashcan). Combine that with some Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) and Harry Osborn (Jmes Franco) footage as they want something from Peter (she wants a love admission, he wants to know why Peter seems to protect his father's killer) . Then the second half is all Doc Ock action and Spidey fighting scenes, flashes of Tobey's chest, people getting picked up like rag dolls, the Ock origin scene, and massive street battles.

Footage
Around seven minutes of footage were on hand as well. The scene began with the end scene from the teaser trailer - spidey and Doc Ock on top of a clock tower fighting each other. The fight is brutal - the four mechanical claws get really worked out, Spidey has ALL sorts of web shooting tricks and some quite spectacular action which moves to a fast moving train headed for danger. A simply awesome action clip, perhaps what's coolest is that Ock lacks any sympathy. In a moment where passengers all stand up to him and say "To get to him, you'll have to come through us", he yells "Ok" and proceeds to push/crush them aside and/or off the train.

Date Announcements
The second film has been moved and will now debut in US theatres on Wednesday, June 30th 2004. They also confirmed that "Spider-Man 3" is all set for a May 4th 2007 release with all the key cast and crew (Raimi, Maguire, Dunst, Arad & Ziskin) all involved.