Spidey’s Smaller Bulge

After much back and forth between Sony and Sam Raimi the studio has decided to pull the plug on Spider-Man 4 in 2011 and instead reboot the series.  Rebooting sounds like a bad sex game involving Lee Ermey from Full Metal Jacket, but Sony intends to relaunch the Spidey series in 2012 with Marc Webb directing.  You might know Webb from the other blockbuster he directed, (500 Days) Of Summer.  That’s called sarcasm folks, because other than a few Green Day videos Marc hasn’t shot anything more expensive than his own wedding video.

By Robertadam

The studio is counting on Webb’s ability to get in touch with the younger crowd, because the reboot involves Peter Parker heading back to high school when his manhood hasn’t fully developed yet and turned him into Spider-Man.  In fact, Amy Pascal Sony’s Chairman of Motion Pictures said “We wanted someone who could capture the awe of being in Peter’s shoes so the audience could experience his sense of discovery while giving real heart to the emotion, anxiety and recklessness of that age”.  It’s a good thing no one is making a movie about my “sense of discovery” in high school, it would be awfully lonely.

So in 2012 there will be a Spider-Man film that shows how Peter Parker becomes Spider-Man.  Didn’t I just see that in 2002?  And it was a pretty good film with a pretty good cast.  I get rebooting a failed film like The Hulk, but I don’t understand remaking a hugely successful film a mere ten years after it was released.  To make things even more interesting, Marvel comics had launched a whole new series where the characters were taken back to their origins called Ultimate Marvel.  But Ultimate Spider-Man was cancelled back in July 2009.  So the guys who created the character were not feeling the origin story anymore but the studio that paid them for the rights to the character is feeling it (again).

It’s too bad someone doesn’t call James Cameron and ask him to dust off his old treatment from the early nineties.  It probably doesn’t have any blue people in it, but I guarantee you there would be some sequences that would make a Na’vi tail stand at attention.  I’m not very excited about remaking a Spidey film I still remember and that had effects which still hold up today, but if Sony wants to bring Peter Parker back to high school and give him a little less bulge in the tights that’s their prerogative.