Hrmn. On the one hand, what I want most is someone who can act, act well, and BE acting in a movie that doesn't suck *kaff*Spiderman3*kaff*. On the other hand... Peter Parker's family, his beliefs, his backstory, they work for him as he is. It's not a race thing quite as much as it is a cultural thing. It's the whole package. He's the unassuming white kid nerd in New York who doesn't come from money, sans parents, raised by his aunt & uncle.
To change one element is to ripple outward and change all elements. You can't just shift the race of the character and call it a day. Okay, what part of New York is he from? What does being a black kid with no parents growing up there mean? What was his childhood like? How does he interact in school? It's not as simple, as one person said, as the level of melanin in his skin. That's the starting point; you then need to consider what, as a result of that level of melanin, has also changed for him and for his situation. All things- culturally, family dynamics, friend dynamics, scholastic dynamics -changes when you change where a person came from, what their heritige is.
I'm not oppossed to the idea per say; I just think Hollywood would handle the idea of a black Spider-Man horribly. He'd either end up a stereotype, or he'd end up absolutely no different than original flavor Spider-Man, and both are damn wrong in their own way. Only- ONLY! -if they treated this logically, and gave the change the ramifications it deserved to have in a real world setting, would it fly with audiences.
Now, you tell me what's more likely; Marvel and those working under them for the new movie are going to take the extra time and effort and energy and think this through as deeply as it'd deserve to be thought through... or they just drop the idea and hire someone who looks more or less like the comic version and move on from that?
