This rumour comes from a UK gossip magazine, so it’s almost certainly just been made-up. All the same, there’s an interesting kink or two in the details…

According to OK, Efron has been hand-picked for the role of Peter Parker by Tobey Maguire. We’d previously heard that Sam Raimi had personally selected Nimrod Antal for the director’s chair, and that didn’t turn out at all - the job went to Marc Webb. Perhaps (just perhaps) Raimi and Maguire did nominate their favoured replacements, and these favoured replacements were Antal and Efron. That’s not impossible.

Efron is currently making a concerted effort to get on board some good projects, and is currently tied-up with Brian Michael Bendis, creator of Ultimate Spider-Man, the comics that have inspired this new reboot of the movies. In a universe where Bendis has come over to Sony to redraft the new Spidey films, maybe Efron could have come with him. The questions is… do we really live in that universe? I doubt it, but it certainly doesn’t seem like too horrible a place.

Note how I didn’t even dignify the Hudgens element of the OK story with any discussion. That certainly has a bad smell about it. And that $9 million pay out? Not on an $80 million budget, I’d say.

So, have OK gotten a hold of a legitimate piece of news here, a little tidbit from inside Efron’s circle, and then padded it with made up bumph? It’s more likely they just made it all up, of course. That’s the line I’m taking.

Bendis is very good at revealing little hints at his career moves via his Twitter account (recently: “one of my all time fave artists handed in an issue of a book i wrote today and it’s perfect. an artist i’ve never worked with before”) while never actually giving away all of the facts. Are there any hints he’s working on a Spider-Man script? If you’ve spotted any, please do share - because I can’t sniff out a thing.