Allow me to take you on a small adventure through my life of the last few months. With more spare time than I’ve had in the last six years and a cornucopia of neglected hobbies crying out for attention, trying to choose what to do next can be rather difficult. Between getting back into Warhammer and dedicating more time to my D&D campaign I’ve found that reading my varied library of comic books is one of the most enjoyable ways to spend my time. So far I’ve revisited the incredible Hush storyline in Batman and a long run of Daredevil written by Brian Michael Bendis for the Marvel Knights imprint. As a result of this I have also started keeping up a bit more with current comics online and I have to say I’m immediately disappointed in what’s been done.
I stopped buying comics shortly after Marvel’s Civil War crossover that piggybacked directly from the House of M crossover, and the best that I can tell is Marvel hasn’t stopped with crossovers since. Obviously as a child of the 80’s I have some romanticized concept that a crossover is something done only rarely and to be treated as a special event. I imagine the original charm of the crossover was the interaction of different heroes and intellectual properties, but in this day and age when characters like Daredevil, Spiderman, and (for the love of god) Wolverine are regular members of the Avengers I feel that the crossover has lost nearly all of its unique appeal. Guest starring characters and teamwork are so prevalent that the crossover can easily be seen as simple money making schemes by the comic book companies.
Looking further into the history of crossovers and unique comic book events, I was led to events like Batman’s back being broken by Bane and the death of Superman in the 90’s. As I read the Wikipedia page about the Death of Superman I came across this historic gem:
From 1994 to 1998, projected film adaptations of the The Death of Superman storyline faced numerous problems with the script process. Writers proposed major changes to the character, including the absence of the Superman costume, and the lack of the power of flight. One of the writers, Kevin Smith, said, “The thing that bothered me about [writer] Greg Poirier’s draft: they were trying to give Superman angst. They had Clark Kent going to a psychiatrist at one point. Superman’s angst is not that he doesn’t want to be Superman. If he has any [angst], it’s that he can’t do it all; he can’t do enough and save everyone…Batman is about angst; Superman is about hope.”
This sat in my mind until a few days ago when I heard the rumor of John Malkovich being cast as the Vulture in Spiderman 4, followed a day later by the news that the fourth movie had been canceled. It turns out Marvel and Sony are planning a reboot of the Spiderman franchise in the vein of Batman Begins which certainly has some promise but also makes me incredibly dubious on its prospects. Batman came out in 1989 and was followed by sequels in 1992, 1995, and 1997. Wait, hold on! Did I just refer to the movie Batman & Robin as an actual sequel to the Batman franchise? Heresy you might say (and I’ve said it in the past)! Well there’s a definitive reason that I have included it in this post, but first let’s finish this look at the history of the franchise. Batman Begins rebooted it in 2005, sixteen years after the original franchise was launched and subsequently sputtered out.
I strongly believe that a large part of the success of the franchise reboot was due to the fact that it had been so many years between the creation of the movies. Not only had technology improved a great deal over those sixteen years, but movie making in general had many great advances with movies like The Matrix and the revitalization of superhero genre in the first X-Men movie. In contrast the first Spiderman movie came out in 2002, followed by sequels in 2004 and 2007. I have to admit that I am happy they are not producing a fourth because I do not feel that any comic book franchise has managed to achieve more than two quality movies in a row (pending the third Batman movie by Christopher Nolan). However, I feel that a reboot of the Spiderman franchise so soon after the original will only manage to produce a movie eerily similar to the first movie by Sam Raimi.
I would be remiss if I did not also mention the Superman franchise, as that is what led to this whole thing, which had the first movie produced in 1978 with sequels in 1980, 1983, and 1987. The franchise was rebooted in 2006 with Superman Returns, a solid 28 years after the first. This leads me back to the above quote from the Wikipedia page for the Death of Superman, which is followed by this glorious piece of fact:
Superman Reborn, retitled Superman Lives, was slated for release on July 4, 1998, directed by Tim Burton and with Nicolas Cage to portray Superman. However, following the box office disappointment of Batman & Robin, the project was scrapped.
And now you know why I have decided to re-include the film Batman & Robin as a sequel in the original Batman franchise, because had it not existed we may have been subjected to something far, far worse.
I was one of those who was eager to see Raimi and the current cast of characters move on from the franchise, so for me this is very good news. I understand why he doesn’t like Venom – I’m no great fan myself – but if the studio was insisting on it and he wasn’t willing to do the character properly he should have walked away from the project. Instead he kept his millions of dollars and stomped all over the character, seemingly out of spite. I’m glad he didn’t do it again.
I’ve always felt that the best way to keep these franchises healthy is to prevent the creative talent from permanently latching on. Sam Raimi had a great vision of Spider-Man, but I’m sure another director can be found with just as much passion and the capacity to bring him to the screen, perhaps even better than the last “trilogy.” After all, writers and artists are constantly rotating through the big comic book characters; every year or two we see a new interpretation of virtually every major character. Why should the movies be different?
Three movies is probably plenty for any of these franchises…and, yeah, I’m including Batman, no matter how great the past two films were or how great the next one is. Nolan’s vision of Batman and of Gotham are brilliant, and he’s got a fantastic cast. But, just like Raimi, there are certain aspects of the Batman universe Nolan doesn’t dig…particularly those villains with fantastical abilities. Why should the fanbase be denied a great Clayface, Mr. Freeze or Man-Bat because one director has a permanent monopoly on the property?
Comic book characters have always been bigger than any one person or any one vision, because so many people have contributed to the evolution of the character. For Hollywood to try to associate any of these characters with a particular person is a mistake…one that would lead to the stagnation of the genre. For this reason, I was quite relieved to hear that Raimi, Maguire and crew are moving on. It’s time for a fresh take.
Now. That said. What IS important to me is that what’s happened in the franchise is respected. I’m not pleased with the news that they are planning to return Peter to high school, since the first movie established that Spider-Man didn’t really properly come to be until after graduation. I’m hoping they’ll move away from that. Furthermore, I would be VERY unhappy if they completely reboot it, origin and all. Putting the origin back on screen would be a huge mistake. Raimi nailed it, it wasn’t too long ago that we saw it, don’t. do it. again. The word “origin” hasn’t been bandied about yet, so I’m optimistic.
To sum up: Incredible Hulk handled the “reboot” issue perfectly. If they manage to do something along those lines – even if they gave us a “lost story” that could have taken place somewhere in the midst of the trilogy. Here’s hoping!
Instead he kept his millions of dollars and stomped all over the character, seemingly out of spite. I’m glad he didn’t do it again.
I think you’re misreading that situation. Raimi didn’t want to use Venom because he didn’t have any good ideas for Venom – his idea was to do a Sandman/Green Goblin movie. When Marvel insisted that he use Venom in the movie he tried to work with them, but ultimately it failed because he didn’t really know what to do with the character. Marvel probably didn’t help much because, frankly, reading the last 20 years of Venom stories tells me that they don’t know what to do with the character either – they know he looks cool, and if you put him in a book people will buy it, but beyond that they’ve got nothing. (Is the Scorpion still Venom these days? – I stopped reading Marvel comics around Civil War as well). If Sony/Marvel wanted to have a good Sam Raimi Spider-man movie they would have gotten the hell out of his way and let him handle it, like they did for the first two movies. Eventually he would have run out of steam, but they would have gotten a good Spider-man 3 out of him instead of the half-assed mess it turned into.
As far as the reboot goes – I have almost zero hopes that it will be a movie that I’m interested in. The early buzz is that the script is a “gritty, edgy, contemporary, high-school aged Spider-man” – none of which are good words to hear coming out of a Hollywood person’s mouth. There’s a good chance that they’re thinking “Hey, the kids just love that Twilight stuff – let’s do that with Spider-man”. There’s a chance that it could turn out decent, but I’m going to keep my expectations sub-zero and then if it turns out good I can be pleasantly surprised. Which was, to be honest, how I handled the Batman reboot as well – though Batman did have the benefit of being rebooted after the truly execrable “Batman and Robin” destroyed any good-will the franchise had while “Spider-man 3” merely left people shaking their heads and wondering what happened. This is more like deciding to reboot Batman after Batman Returns.
Matt Goodwin & Jer: I’m still not sure how I feel about taking Spiderman back to highschool, I think it could work either way. I wasn’t quite so upset about how they did Venom, I was mostly just happy to see him on the big screen, though I did have a problem with him putting innocent lives in danger because that’s what makes the character interesting. Honestly the part of the third movie that ruined things for me was how Peter was treated under the influence of the black costume, him dancing and taking minor advantage of girls is not what I consider “evil”.
Jer: I love the comparison of Spider-man 3 to Batman Returns, though I’d probably put it closer to Batman Forever. Now that I think about it the Spider-man movie franchise pretty damn closely followed the 80’s-90’s Batman franchise as far as I’m concerned. Thankfully they’re not deciding to make the Batman & Robin of Spider-man movies, but as I argue in my post I think it’s too soon to do a true “reboot” and instead I think it’d be fine if they just make a new movie that rewinds a bit or even is just a bit of a flashback / retelling of some things.
I’m curious about other people’s thoughts and feelings on Superman Returns, as I’ve heard some people who hate it and I personally really enjoy it.
Considering the ungodly amount of money TDK made expect the next 3-5 years of cape movies released to be gritty, ‘realistic’, etc. I think that Spiderman could totally work if they kept Peter in high school for the movie series and actually developed supporting characters from that comic book era other than just MJ and Harry. Honestly, if you want to see a model of quasi-high school in a heroic movie I’d hope they’d look to Harry Potter over Twilight.
I skipped Superman Returns in the theater, and actually only saw it a year or two ago. I thought it was all right. It was certainly better than some of the later examples in the original franchise, and I appreciated that it wasn’t a reboot, since it at least loosely maintained continuity with the original Christopher Reeve films. My main issue with it was Supes felt sort of wooden, but I kind of feel that way about the character in comics, too, so I guess they were being pretty faithful.
I was deeply disappointed in Spider-Man 3, not only for the horrible treatment of Venom, but also for the pathetic handling of Peter under the influence of the black costume, and the terrible costume design on Harry as the Green Goblin (really? a flying snowboard?). Besides which, 3 villains in a single movie is at least 1 too many–it gives short shrift to all of them and doesn’t let any of the plots tied to them develop properly. I can see the movie Raimi wanted to make inside it (it isn’t that hard to excise all the Venom bits in your mind), and it definitely would have been a better film, but what we got was mediocre at best.
Still, it was better than X-Men 3, and MUCH better than Batman & Robin.
I have a pretty serious soft spot for Spider-man–he was pretty much my favorite comic character growing up and I collected all his books through middle school and much of high school. But I quit comics in disgust in the midst of the Onslaught storyline, where they killed off half the Marvel heroes so they could reboot them all. So I don’t care for gratuitous reboots–I feel they cheapen what has gone before, even if its inconsistent or hokey in places (as much of the history of comic characters inevitably becomes over time). I think they’re, as a rule, even worse in the arena of movies because they’re symptomatic of a lack of creativity in Hollywood, along with remakes (almost the same thing, just not a comic property) and novel adaptations (even when they’re good ones, you’re just snagging someone else’s creativity and leeching off of it), which collectively seem like the majority of new films coming out these days. I’m sure there are very creative writers in the industry, but the suits that green light projects seem to be afraid of new ideas.
That being said, Batman Begins and the Dark Knight were both great movies, and I’m heartily glad they rebooted Batman. But that’s in large part because the original movies were, frankly, never very faithful to the character (I find a lot of people remember Burton’s original Batman with rose-colored glasses. If you actually re-watch the movie now, it isn’t nearly as good as we remember it being, and Batman Returns was even more so), and went off into the realm of the deeply awful with the later installments.
So there are certainly instances where a reboot is warranted, but doing one just because your original cast and director are moving on is not a good enough reason by itself. Spidey 3 was less than good, but the first 2 were great films. So if they really want to make another one, let some new people build on that, instead of tearing it down and starting over.