Raimi given the (re)boot…

Updated on January 12, 2010 By Ken Begg 20 Comments

It’s funny, just days ago we were starting to get confirmation that John Malkovich was in talks to play the Vulture in Spider-Man 4.  Now, this morning the breaking news is that the film–scheduled for a 2011 release–has been scrapped.*  Raimi and his attendant cast (Tobey Maguire, ect.) are out.  The series will be rebooted, with Peter Parker returned to his roots as a high school student.

[*The reboot is now aiming for 2012.  Assuming they mean the summer of that year, rather than the holiday season–the two traditional times for blockbusters–2012 will be a crazy superhero season, with Marvel planning to release both Captain America and The Avengers, and DC/Warners quite possibly having something in the pipe.  Hopefully the market won’t be over saturated.]

Some fear, and with reason (never underestimate Hollywood’s cravenness), that Sony hopes to ‘Twilight‘ up the series.  We’ll see.  Peter Parker is sort of a mopey character, but hopefully they won’t go that far.  And as always, there’s never really a bad idea.  Bringing Peter back to his roots could really work–if they pull it off.

If they don’t, heads will surely roll.  Although Spider-Man 3 was largely considered a bit of a misfire, this reboot remains a real roll of the dice.  If the gamble doesn’t pay off, somebody’s going to take the blame.  Hopefully this means they’ll focus on getting things right.  Nobody wants to be the guy who killed a successful franchise.  Ask Joel Schumacher.

As for why they made the change?  After all, Hollywood is at least as risk-adverse as any other mega-corporation.  Maybe they felt Raimi just wasn’t really that interested anymore?  (Although the bombing of Drag Me to Hell probably re-whetted his appetite a bit.)

Maybe the studio didn’t like Raimi’s continued insistence on old-school villains like the Vulture, in lieu of (yawn) Venom or Carnage?  Maybe it was just that the director and stars were now in line to make too much money, and they decided to bring in new, cheaper people and keep every buck up there on the screen?  Perhaps they just didn’t like where things were going as the fourth movie began to shape up.

In any case, there we are.  Again, as is too often the case, the stories behind the movies strike me as more interesting than the films themselves often turn out to be.  In any case, I commend Raimi for his superior work, especially on the superlative Spider-Man 2.  I commend Maguire and Dunst for their adequacy filling parts ably, if not with any particular elan.  And I look forward to seeing how this flick turns out.

Not as interested as I am in Captain America and The Avengers, though.  Frankly, Sony can screw up Spider-Man all they want if Marvel can get those two right.

Pin It



Related Posts

  • Mr. Rational

    “There’s never really a bad idea?” Spoken like someone who does not yet have enough respect for the collected works of Todd Sheets. :)

  • Well, OK, there are bad ideas. However, I’ve learned that execution is always WAY more important than whether an idea is “fresh” or not. Originality is great, if you actually do something with it.

    Look at it this way. Television has certainly been more interesting lately than movies, on the whole. And look at the truly great shows of the last ten years: The Shield and The Wire (cop shows), Battlestar Galactica (space opera), Deadwood (Western), etc. None of these shows reinvented the wheel, they just really did things right.

  • fish eye no miko

    Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for the old school villains, too… but I LIKE Venom. Maybe with the reboot, they’ll do his storyline RIGHT.

  • Mr. Rational

    No arguments at all on your larger point. I remember reading a great article once about how many/most science-fiction and fantasy classic novels are retreads of cliches…what makes them work is the writing and characterization. Ender’s Game, I remember, scored a prominent mention, since its is one of the hoariest — “And the game was REAL!”

    Just making the counterpoint that there seems to be an exception to every rule…and the smaller side point that it very often has something to do with Todd Sheets. :)

  • monoceros4

    Eh, we are talking about Spider-Man here. Rolling back any encroachment of maturity isn’t exactly a new thing for him. And, really, if you watch any of the Raimi films with a dispassionate eye, can you honestly say that any of them is really any good?

  • Yes. Spider-Man 2 is great. probably the best superhero movie until The Dark Knight, although now it’s probably been tied by Iron Man.

    One piece of advice for the makers of the new film: Don’t spend a ton of time rehashing Spider-Man’s origin again. That includes the whole Uncle Ben thing. Been there, done that. Look at the way the Incredible Hulk recapitulated his origin in the film’s opening credits, and go that route.

  • PB210

    So they will do the origin all over again?

    This has not often happened, that they would retell the origin upon somebody else taking the role. When Brandon Routh took over as Superman, they did not bother with an origin retelling, just some supplemental flashbacks.

    Aside from the obvious case of Batman Begins, I can recall a similar situation with Tarzan, where they did retell the origin upon replacing the lead.

    Elmo Lincoln played the adult Tarzan first in 1918. Johnny Weismuller took over in 1933. After Johnny Weissmuller left the role in 1948, Lex Barker and Gordon Scott played Tarzan, as well as a few others such as Jock Mahoney and Denny Miller. They made Tarzan films regularly up to about 1968, with Mike Henry as one of the last to reprise the role. Since 1968, a few Tarzan films have appeared (with Miles O’Keefe, Christopher Lambert, and Casper Van Dien), but nobody has played him more than once to my knowledge. The whoe concept of a British lord lost as a baby emerging as the ruler of the jungle seems quite condescending today.

    Near as I can tell, when recasting Tarzan, they did not always or often retell his origin or first meeting Jane or other Caucasians.

    The tellings of Tarzan’s origins include:
    1918 Elmo Lincoln
    1933 Weismuller
    1959 Denny Miller
    1981 Miles O’Keefe
    1984 Christopher Lambbert

    (I exclude the two animated Tarzan movies).

    _______________________________________

    “Yes. Spider-Man 2 is great. probably the best superhero movie until The Dark Knight, although now it’s probably been tied by Iron Man”.

    Considering that he does not have metahuman powers, we should just call him a costumed hero. In the old days, when R-rated adventure films featuring just hardasses with military training or who knew martial arts reached theaters much more often than they do today, more of a gulf existed then, but these days, a costume does not stand out as much.

  • fish eye no miko

    Ken Begg said “One piece of advice for the makers of the new film: Don’t spend a ton of time rehashing Spider-Man’s origin again. […] Look at the way the Incredible Hulk recapitulated his origin in the film’s opening credits, and go that route.”

    Agreed; we don’t need it retold. The Incredible Hulk thing was a great example of how to cover a well-known origin story without boring your audience. Plus the homage to the series was cool. ^_^

    I might add: Can we please have only one villain, two tops?

  • BeckoningChasm

    I thought Spider-Man 3 was so bad, it looked like a contract-breaker. Over-stuffed with villains, too much Mary Jane (especially the singing), too much with “evil Peter Parker.”

    By contrast, Spider-Man 2 was almost perfect. Certainly one of the best “villains” ever on screen. Its major flaw, to me, was again too much Mary Jane. “So what if you have endless problems, Peter? You didn’t go to my play so I’m dropping you as a friend.” Sheesh.

  • David Fullam

    I have to admit that I did enjoy the third film. Yes, it was the weakest and my least favorite, but it did entertain me and made me want to see more from the same team. Hollywood can be such a vindictive place. I figured this was the studio’s revenge for Raimi not wanting to use Venom. Sort of “Okay, you didn’t want to use our villain? Then screw you and the Vulture.”

  • As Ken knows, I disagree about Iron Man.

    Speaking as a video game developer, one of the questions I get asked all the time is “where do you get your ideas?” I always give the same answer – ideas are a dime a dozen. You can take ANYONE and put them in a locked room for a week and have them think up ideas. They’ll come up with something. The tough part is the next 2 years of development, trying to create the product.

    I have my doubts about Hollywood’s ability to do Captain America. Ed Brubaker said, just before killing off Steve Rogers,

    “What I found is that all the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be standing out on and giving speeches on the streetcorner against the Bush administration, and all the really right-wing [fans] all want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein.”

    That to me, is not a recipe for success.

  • That’s why setting the film in WWII was an obvious choice. Leftwing or rightwing or nowing, nobody can argue with Cap fighting Ratzies.

  • ligerfanj

    I could see the two-villain concept used effectively by taking a lower-tier villain and have the hero fight him in the intro credits, then with that out of the way, start with the main villain.

  • Another way to use two villains effectively is to bring back a villain from a previous movie. For all the suckitude of Spiderman 3, I was thrilled to see the Goblin fighting on Parker’s side at the climax. But I would have b een happier to have only Venom or Sandman as an opponent.

  • Toby

    I liked Spider-Man 3, although it fell pretty low on my list compared to other Marvel movies. But I don’t think it can claim to have killed the franchise the way Batman and Robin did.

    Its biggest problem was its complete faillure to make Sandman a threat. The only thing that was ever less than sympathetic about him was being Uncle Ben’s shooter. And the fact that he was remorseful and we could tell from the beginning kind of killed that.

    Venom’s portrayal was better – they succeeded in making Eddie Brock unlikeable before he changed, and in making the costume a threat. The biggest problem was I think the problem though is that Raimi was forced into including him and didn’t have his heart in it. Maybe if he any enthusiasm for the Venom character he might have done better with the scenes of Peter under the effects of the costume. The Animated Series did this story better, I’d have to admit.

    I don’t think the number of villains was excessive, but I have to say that including Gwen Stacey was a big mistake. The whole reason they didn’t include her in the first one was because comic book fans wouldn’t be invested in a relationship that they knew was doomed, which is why they used MJ for the George Washington Bridge scene. I don’t know why they thought she’d work here. If they needed a rival for Peter’s affections, it should have been Felicia Hardy or Liz Allen. Or Betty Brant for that matter.

    Even so, was Spider-Man 3 really bad enough to warrant a reboot? No, and I will be boycotting it when it comes out. For me, Tobey Maguire IS Spider-Man (and so is Christopher Daniel Barnes, I guess).

  • PB210

    Saimi should feel fortunate that he has not ended up the way other independent horror film makers such as John Carpenter, Don Coscarelli, Tobe Hooper, etc. have ended up. Other than Wes Craven, most of those independent film makers who made a silk purse out of a sow’s ear have seen spotty distribution of their films in theaters in recent years, and have not graduated to large budget films.

  • PB210

    Tobe Maguire better hope he does not end up the way Christopher Reeve did after Superman IV (other than the whole spinal injury thing). Christopher Reeve had reached the age of 35 when he made Superman IV. Maguire has reached the age of 34.

  • Mark

    I had no idea “Drag me to hell” bombed, always thought it did ok, maybe slightly disappointing given the reviews, but still made back its money.

    Not too surprised to hear that Raimii is getting replaced, apparently he almost got fired when he made Spiderman 3 and there are rumours that he deliberatedly overdid the scenes the studio insisted upon, so it was probably an inevitable move.

  • Reed

    Doing a story “right” is impossible; there are too many definitions of right. I have no emotional ties to Venom and liked the way he was handled in the movie. On the other hand, I have liked Sandman as a villain since I was in junior high and was really disappointed with his role. Like-wise including too much MJ in a movie; Peter’s interactions with his soon to be tragic romantic partner have always provided the emotional core of the Spider Man stories. It’s hard to be a hero when regular life craps on you all the time, thus it’s supposed to be all the more poignant when Spidey triumphs over evil even at great personal cost. I didn’t really buy the soap opera in any of the 3 movies, but some people loved it. What are you going to do?

    I agree with the commentors who have said that it’s all in the execution. My current favorite comic example are the stories of Ed Brubaker. Whenever I hear a synopsis of his ideas (there have been an endless line of Immortal Iron Fists, Bucky is still alive, etc.) I always think, “What a stupid idea.” However, I have generally enjoyed the stories that he told based on ideas that I hated.

    Still, I’m not looking forward to the re-boot. Frankly, as an adult I just hate movies set in high school. However, it’s not my money that they’re trying to get. Goodbye, demographic sweet spot. I hardly knew you. :(

  • John Nowak

    I’m quite fond of the first two films, but didn’t like Spider-Man 3 at all. The “Sandman killed Uncle Ben, no, really, we’re sure this time” plot device smelled of being a plot device, and I can’t imagine a more strained introduction to a threat than “A meteor happens to land next to our hero.”

    That said, I’m just sorry that the team didn’t have a chance to go out on a high note.