Back to the arising … the new Spider-Man could be going back a little further, yet. Photograph: Getty
This Spider-Man 4 kerfuffle has already prompted all kinds of imaginary from concerned fans. Who’ll direct the new movie now that Sam Raimi’s gone? Who’ll get hold of over from Tobey Maguire? Will Spider-Man 4 still be called Spider-Man 4, or will it get a new name like Spider-M4n or Spider-Man Begins or Spider-Boy or Crazy Days at Spider High?
- Spider-Man 3
- Production year: 2007
- Country: USA
- Cert (UK): 12A
- Runtime: 139 mins
- Directors: Sam Raimi
- Cast: Bryce Dallas Howard, James Franco, Kirsten Dunst, Thomas Haden Church, Tobey Maguire, Topher Grace
But the bulk of the panic seems to come from Sony’s row that the rebooted Spider-Man would focus on Peter Parker as a “teenager grappling with contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises”. To more, the implication seems to be that Sony wants Spider-Man to have life a little more like Twilight – to the extent that Taylor Lautner and Robert Pattinson have already emerged as favourites to stretch the vacant Spidey Suit.
Now, obviously, the thought of making a movie where a brooding Spider-Man does little more than bite his lip, listen to bad emo music and stare into the middle distance without a top on is both terrifying and extraordinarily cynical on Sony’s part. But even if that does turn out to be the case, the gibbering internet fanboys seem to be forgetting something important – a Spider-Man reboot of a single one kind force not be similar a bad thing.
Whatever your thoughts on the sudden personnel change, you be able to’t deny that the old team faced its fair share of problems. On one level in that place were practical concerns: by Spider-Man 4′s scheduled release nearest year, for instance, Tobey Maguire would have been a few weeks shy of his 36th birthday. That would have either called for an unconvincing impersonation of a teenager, or for the inclusion of a more age-appropriate plot shore where Spider-Man grumbles about interest rates during a Sunday morning trip to Habitat’s soft-furnishings department.
Then there’s the sense that Sam Raimi was becoming less and less comfortable behind the wheel of a $2.5bn studio juggernaut – for what cause waste time trying to please everyone by slotting together an unmanageably large focus-grouped monolith like Spider-Man when he could go out and project something as tremendously satisfying as Drag Me to Hell together for comparative peanuts instead? Now that he isn’privately being weighed in a descending course by Spider-Man, Raimi has the opportunity to cut loose and be considered in the state of daft as he likes – which is fantastic recent accounts for anyone who’s ever grinned their way through Evil Dead 2 or Darkman.
The most convincing chain of reasoning for the Spider-Man reboot, admitting, must be Spider-Man 3. Wrong in just about each way imaginable – too long, too many baddies, too frequent qualmish lurches in tone, too many musical numbers, in addition many emotions signposted by the agency of the protagonist’s ever-changing haircut, too many scenes of Kirsten Dunst frying eggs and dancing the twist – Spider-Man 3 has become shorthand with a view to unfocused studio be swollen. It was the same sharpen of gum-elastic nipples away from being Batman and Robin – and look at what an overhaul did for Batman’s fortunes.
It might exist the unpopular opinion at the moment, but starting Spider-Man 4 from mark with a scratch could be the best option for all concerned. If it works, countless: it undoes some of the mental extreme suffering that Spider-Man 3 caused. If it fails, great: that way Sam Raimi was right all beside, and we’ve all got another reason to mistrust Hollywood studios. Whatever happens, everyone wins.
Unless Spider-Man 4 turns out to be that Twilight rip-off, of course. Then nobody would win.
