Tobey Maguire in Spider-Man.

"It is cool for me and hard on Tobey," Raimi notes. "He's got to do everything he could possibly do as Spider-Man. Stuntmen can fill in for the wide shots, CG can fill in for the outrageous stuff. But he's had to do a tremendous amount of physical action, of rolling, tumbling, leaping, landing, punching, fighting, falling." It's a touchy subject, because Spider-Man 2 almost imploded when there was talk that Maguire couldn't return because of back problems. "We're always careful with him," Ziskin says. "I mean, he has chronic problems and he works on it and he has a chiropractor, and we're careful in terms of what we ask him to do."

For Spider-Man 2, the production developed new gear that helped relieve the strain of dangling from harnesses. As for the costume itself, "it got a little more comfortable," Maguire reports. "Some of the undergear was more uncomfortable in the first one, and then the second one it got better, and then the third one I think I ended up finally getting some orthotics in the bottom of the boot."

Raimi can talk about the suit in the most minute detail — hey, at around $30,000 a pop, each one has an impact on his bottom line — but for Spider-Man 3, he found himself obsessing about a new element: sand. "Everything in movies is so drawn out to the outrageous detail," he says. "We looked at like 16 different sands. And then combinations of sand. We had to photograph it close up, seeing how it reacted to light. 'What's the best way to light falling sand? What kind of contrast ratio does the sand have? How does it pile?' We had to bury people alive in this sand, so we had to have a substitute material that could double for it. Because you can't really bury people alive in sand. We ended up using ground-up corncobs, and so we had to choose something that had a similar quality. We ended up with something called Arizona sand."

He adds that about one out of every five shots involving sand are the real deal, and the others are computer-generated. "We really want to give the audience something they've never seen before." To this end, he enlisted Sony Pictures Imageworks to come up with a shape-shifting Sandman who could blow away the previous CG sand effects of the Mummy films — something Arad says they accomplished easily. ("Oh, forget it," Arad scoffs at the notion of comparing them.)

Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina as Doctor Octopus in Spider-Man 2.

Even a cursory review of the first two Spider-Man films shows that computer technology can progress in leaps and bounds. "We look at some of the early shots we did in Spider-Man and they're just nowhere near... We didn't know as much," Ziskin says. "The animators learned as they went, and I think it got much better in 2. And as the artistry improves and the technology improves, the director's demands increase. So no one can rest on their laurels."

"So what's the price on something like that?" Raimi asks. We're now sitting with the Spider-Man visual-effects team, watching a five-second sequence on a large screen above the editing facilities. "Black Spidey," as Raimi calls him, enters a bank that has been torn up by a robbery.

Raimi wants to know the cost for a slight FX tweak on the lighting of Spider-Man's costume. Someone in back says, "Less than $10,000 and more than $5,000," and adds that the fix might not even work. These are the little decisions Raimi has to make. Today, he's already given notes on a sound design mix he's just heard and sent an artist back to the drawing board after the 3-D mock-up of a creature that Sandman morphs into differed from the 2-D rendering. And after this visual-effects meeting, he'll spend 22 hours with his brother Ivan rewriting a scene that they're shooting next week.

"Let's not spend the money then," Raimi calls out in the darkness.

It's ironic that the director would care about a few thousand dollars in a $250 million production. Although no one will confirm the final budget, Ziskin attributes any increases to the visual effects and the fact that "both above and below the line, the movie gets more expensive in terms of just the talent involved. We have really first-class talent in every department, many of whom have been with us. We're a family."

Clearly, the cumulative success of the franchise adds to its cumulative cost (Maguire's fee alone has reportedly jumped from $4 million for the first one to more than $10 million for each sequel). And the franchise is unusual in that the same director and lead actor have been holding the reins for all three films. It begs the question, even before we've seen number three, if there will be a fourth.