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Step on Spider! Rebooting the Spider-Man Movie Franchise.
Sony announced Monday that they’re scrapping plans for a Sam Raimi-directed Spider-Man 4 and moving forward with a reboot of the franchise instead. It seems that there were some creative differences between Sam Raimi and the studio, which led to Raimi’s departure from the film and Sony’s decision to return the webslinger to high school, presumably to re-tell his origin story with another director and cast. That means saying farewell to Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker and Kirsten Dunst as Mary Jane Watson and hello to teen angst and acne.
I’m okay with that. I don’t think it’s too soon for a reboot, nor do I think that a Spider-Man movie with a new cast will have a hard time finding an audience. Here’s why:
Spider-Man 3 was terrible. Deny-its-existence terrible. Let us never speak of it again, as there are plenty of reasons to want a reboot that don’t involve Emo Peter and the Inappropriate Dance Number.
I watched Spider-Man (2002) with my son over the weekend, and I was surprised at how incredibly mediocre it is. Perhaps it’s these rose-colored glasses through which I look back in time, but I could have sworn that Spider-Man was made of awesome at one point. What happened? Well, for starters, I think I forgot to watch Spider-Man as a superhero movie.
See, there was a point in our dark history where Spider-Man was, indeed, awesome…for a superhero movie. I make the distinction because good superhero movies were few and far between, and as an audience we were bound to make certain allowances. Movies featuring costumed heroes were subject to a slightly different (read: lower) set of standards than most other films. We were in the midst of a decade-plus-long drought. The most recent installment in the Batman franchise had completely undone what Tim Burton had accomplished in 1989. Then along came X-Men, and by Kirby it was damn good for a superhero movie! But one film does not correct a decade of abuse, and while our hopes were high for Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man, we still held it to that somewhat less stringent set of standards reserved for movies about men running around in Spandex. By that measure, we were not disappointed, and it seemed as though the superhero genre in film was at the beginning of a Renaissance.
And what Renaissance it’s been! Hellboy! The Incredibles! X-Men 2! Iron Man! Batman Begins and (to a lesser degree)1 The Dark Knight! Heck, I’ll even throw Watchmen and The Incredible Hulk in there, though I understand I’m probably in the minority on those. Sure, for every good superhero movie there’s a mediocre (Ghost Rider) or just downright bad one (The Spirit), but there have been enough good ones in the past ten years that the distinction between watching a superhero movie and just watching a movie started to get blurry. Iron Man isn’t just good “for a superhero movie”, it’s a great action/adventure film that just happens to center around a guy who wears a shiny red-and-yellow computerized battlesuit. It’s also got a dash of romantic comedy, a bit of drama, and did I mention the explosions?
Therein lies the problem: Spider-Man was damn good for a superhero movie in 2002, but it kinda sucks as anything else. Sure, it’s decent action/adventure flick,2 even with Willem Dafoe’s campy turn as Norman Osborne/The Green Goblin, but everything that goes on when the fists aren’t flying is a bit off the mark. It doesn’t work as a romance because Maguire and Dunst have about as much chemistry on-screen as Hayden Christensen and Natalie Portman in Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones, which is to say almost none. It doesn’t work as a drama for almost the same reason: Tobey Maguire just doesn’t have any real emotional range.3 I had no idea that Sony was going to announce their reboot when I was watching Spider-Man this past weekend, but I do remember wishing for another Peter Parker and Mary Jane.
Dropping Maguire and Dunst most likely means getting rid of Cliff Robertson (Uncle Ben), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May) and J.K. Simmons (Daily Bugle publisher J. Jonah Jameson) as well, which is unfortunate as I thought they each exemplified the roles. But change is change, and Sony seems to be wielding a pretty big broom, so I expect the cast to be replaced entirely.
Peter Parker’s transformation into Spider-Man has been told and re-told in the comics numerous times, but my favorite by far is the version written by Brian Michael Bendis for the Ultimate Spider-Man series,4 and if Sony is wise they’ll take a long, hard look at those early issues when they’re rebooting the movie version of the wallcrawler. And perhaps that’s just what they’re planning; after all, the Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson) that appears in Iron Man and will appear in several upcoming Marvel movies was taken directly from the Ultimate Universe, and if that means an opportunity for the new Spider-Man to make an appearance in other Marvel films, well, I’m all for it.5
- Yeah, I said a lesser degree. Wanna fight about it? [↩]
- Spider-Man 2 does a much better job in that respect, but comes across as a ridiculously overwrought drama when webs and metallic tentacles stop clashing. [↩]
- Over the course of two—okay, three—Spider-Man films, I’ve come to realize that Tobey Maguire has two—okay, three—facial expressions, and none of them are particularly convincing. [↩]
- With fantastic art by Mark Bagley. [↩]
- Hey, Sony, how about a Nicholas Hammond cameo, as long as we’re talking about what I’d like to see in a Spider-Man movie? [↩]
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About The Secret Lair
The Secret Lair is a podcast and blog which follows the real life adventures of Kris Johnson and Chris Miller. Together with their staff of contributors and countless minions, they seek to dominate the planet, or at least the tri-county area, using the twin weapons of Discussion and Overwhelming Opinion. And zombies. And maybe a Death Ray. Or two.
Oh man, this is sad. I’m totally with you on most points in here but I still think abandoning the current Spidey team is a mistake. S3 was a stinker, but I can’t help but think that that was more the studio’s fault than Raimi’s. It really felt like a movie that had been heavily meddled with.
S2, on the other hand, is still probably best-of-genre. IRON MAN may be a little better, but I don’t know. S2 is truly sublime, and there are no directorial moments of sheer breathlessness in IRON MAN like the moment where Peter saves everyone on the train.
Man.
Anyway, the real reason I’m commenting is just to register this viewpoint: I will not watch another SPIDER-MAN ORIGIN movie. I hate origin retellings. They drive me batty. I’ve read that story so many times… forget it.
If they must do a re-boot, I hope they will draw a lesson from the HULK reboot and do flashbacks to a fake movie in the opening to cover the origin nonsense and then start an original story. I hate, hate, hate origin movies.
P.S. S1 was pretty banal. yes. Lots of close-ups. Lots of doggy eyes. Nonsense. But S2 leaves the average of the 3 still pretty high.
Wow… My internal geek-cred just went down substantially, as I had to Google “Nicholas Hammond.” Sorry, folks.
@BradyDale — Thanks for the comment. I thought Spider-Man 2 definitely had a better villain and more well-executed action sequences than its predecessor, but almost everything in between those action sequences was worse. Every time Peter talks to someone, they wind up giving him a lecture and the drama is slopped on so thick it drips. I’ve seen Spider-Man 2 only one time, and that was in the theater. I bought the DVD and watched all the extras, but couldn’t bring myself to sit through the preach-fest again; it doesn’t even hold a position on my Top 10 Superhero Movies of All Time OMG EVAR List. Maybe I’ll give it a second chance this weekend.
As to the matter of origin stories, all three Spider-Man flicks had ‘em. The first movie had two: Spidey’s and the Green Goblin’s. The second just dealt with the origin of Doc Ock, and the third…well, we’ll not speak of that. The trick is keeping the origin interesting enough that the audience forgets that all they really want is to see your hero put that costume on for the first time and start kicking somebody’s butt. I think Iron Man handled that pretty well, as did Hellboy. I say: show me the spider bite!
@Gaston — I can’t say I’m surprised.