For me, the big question is... what are they going to call it?
Xyphon said:
Tom Goldman said:
Peter Parker is going back to high school when the next Spider-Man hits theaters in the summer of 2012. Columbia Pictures and Marvel Studios announced today they are moving forward with a film based on a script by James Vanderbilt that focuses on a teenager grappling with both contemporary human problems and amazing super-human crises.
So they're basically remaking the first movie......
Not really. Peter was only in high school in the first movie for the first 30 minutes or so, if I recall correctly, most of the action took place when he was in college and had moved out to live in an apartment with Harry. If they ARE actually taking more inspiration from
Ultimate Spider-Man (something I'd love as I'm an Ultimate reader, not a classic reader) then he'd be staying in high school for the whole story, possibly for several movies.
Commander Breetai said:
Why?
I mean, I can understand them redoing Batman, as Batman and Robin was such a joke they actually had to start over and pretend the first movies never happened, but Spiderman was doing pretty well.
Pretty obvious really- it may have been "doing pretty well" but Sam Raimi said he wouldn't be able to have it done in time, so they had to can it anyway. If it was going to be delayed for too long then there's bigger problems to consider than merely waning interest- Tobey Maguire in particular is rapidly getting too old to play the character of Peter Parker (a problem the Harry Potter franchise may be facing with Daniel Radcliffe if they don't pull their fingers out), since after only 3 films worth of stories he's already older than the real comic book version of the character who's been around since the 60s. (In the comic, Peter is now canonically 30 years old [http://www.spideykicksbutt.com/SpiderMan101/SpiderMan101Part6.html]. Check that site out, it's awesome.)
The more insidious, conspiracy-theory suggestion for why they're taking him back to high school is that this gives them an iron-clad excuse to make the movies without Mary Jane, who in the original comics wasn't introduced until Peter entered college. It's no secret that Marvel headman Joe Quesada is a rapid anti-Peter-MJ shipper, who was single-handedly responsible for dissolving the famous spider-marriage after 20 years based on nothing more than his own personal dislike- and doing it by writing the worst comic book story of all time [http://spideykicksbutt.com/DeepThoughts/OneMoreDay.html] while he was at it. Considering that Peter Parker and Mary Jane Watson are possibly the most recognised comic book couple in the world (only exceeded by Superman and Lois Lane), Joe Q. may see this is a golden opportunity to convince people that MJ ISN'T Peter's one true love after all by having films made without her in them.
Of course, that's a tinfoil hat idea which has virtually no chance of being true and which I just made up for fun- although Marvel HAVE been responsible for stupider stuff than that over the years (Clone Saga anyone?). Of course, Marvel don't actually have the rghts to make the films themselves, that's part of the whole issue, so they don't really have any input (thank Christ for that!) And if the new movie series IS taking its cues directly from
Ultimate Spider-Man then MJ is unavoidable, as in that version she was not only Peter's love interest right from the start, but they were also childhood friends as well.