Not wanting to slow down the Spider-Man hype for a second, Sony have announced a 2nd May, 2014 release date for the sequel to the upcoming The Amazing Spider-Man, just shy of two years after the first film comes out on 3rd July, 2012, /Film report.

In case you’ve missed it, you can catch up with all the fantastic Spidey news we’ve been getting for The Amazing Spider-Man here.

Given that the first film is still just under a year away from release, Sony are certainly showing that they’ve got a lot of faith in director Marc Webb and what he’s done with the reboot. As one Sony executive told Deadline,

“I think it speaks volumes about our confidence in what we are seeing on the new film and our desire to move quickly on the next installment.”

The cynic in you might say that they know Spider-Man is a money-generating machine that they would happily milk a trilogy from regardless of quality, because they know it’s likely to do well at the box office all the same. But everything that we’ve seen so far suggests that Webb* really has made something awesome in this reboot, and that we should definitely have a little faith, and be encouraged by the fact that a sequel – and an all but inevitable trilogy – is looking likely to come our way.

From the first look we got of Andrew Garfield as Spider-Man back at the start of the year, to the set of photos we got from the film that showed us a close-up of his web shooters and the rest of the major characters last month, to the awesome first teaser trailer that we got just a few days later, it’s all been very encouraging. Screenwriter James Vanderbilt, who wrote the screenplay for the first film, was hired back in March to get to work on a screenplay, so it’s good news that he’s been working on it for some time already, and that it’s someone who already knows the story inside-out.

With a cast as awesome as The Amazing Spider-Man has, with Garfield in the lead, supported by Emma Stone as Gwen Stacy, Martin Sheen and Sally Field as Ben and May Parker, and Rhys Ifans as The Lizard, and a director as talented as Marc Webb, it’s all but a sure thing that The Amazing Spider-Man is going to one hell of a movie next year. So with that in mind, confirmation that Sony are moving ahead with the sequel is definitely good news in my books.

*N.B. I’ve only just realised how apt Marc Webb’s surname is to helm a Spider-Man film.