LAS VEGAS: Feel that prickly sensation on the back of your neck? It must be your spider sense telling you the year’s hottest sequel is arriving sooner than expected.

‘Spider-Man 2’ will hit theatres in the United States on June 30, two days earlier than scheduled, said Jeff Blake, vice chairman of Sony Studios. A third instalment in the ‘Spider-Man’ franchise, based on the Marvel Comics superhero, is due out on May 4, 2007.

Starring Tobey Maguire as the masked do-gooder, ‘Spider-Man’ had a record $114.8 million opening weekend and was the top-grossing movie of 2002 with a $403.7 million domestic haul.

Even in a summer packed with such likely blockbusters as ‘Shrek 2’ and ‘Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban’, ‘Spider-Man 2’ is the season’s most-awaited adventure and stands the best chance of passing $300 million megahit ‘The Passion of the Christ’ to become this year’s biggest moneymaker.

"We obviously had enormous success with the first one, which we couldn’t have predicted," Maguire, appearing alongside co-star Kirsten Dunst, told theatre owners at ShoWest. "And we think we’re going to do it again."The studio showed off the final theatrical trailer, which debuts in theatres on April 9, plus an extended action sequence in which Spider-Man battles multi-tentacled villain Doc Ock (Alfred Molina) on a speeding mass-transit train. The new trailer shows Maguire’s Peter Parker trash-canning his Spider-Man suit and rejecting the superhero life so he can woo his sweetheart, Mary Jane Watson (Dunst). But the threat of Doc Ock forces Spider-Man back on the job.

Even with many of the visual effects unfinished, the action sequence wowed the crowd. Shooting dozens of sinewy web strands, Spider-Man uses himself as a living brake pad to slow the train before it plummets off a steep drop at the end of the rail tracks.

Fainting from the exertion, Spider-Man begins toppling off the edge himself, when the hands of commuters he’s saved reach out from inside the train to pull him to safety, passing his limp body overhead and setting him down tenderly.

When our hero regains consciousness, a boy on the train tells him, "It’s good to have you back, Spider-Man." — AP