Let’s cut the bullshit here: the original Spider-Man movie was the start of a great franchise, masterfully directed by Sam Raimi. Spider-Man 2 followed it’s success, and is one of the best comic book movies ever made. Spider-Man 3 fell into the same pitfalls of a studio’s greed and impatience resulting in the fuck up an intellectual property. It was not nearly as good as it’s two predecessors due to complete and utter over saturation, due to what the studios felt was the direction the movie needed to take to maximize profits.
If you strip the movie’s elements apart (performances, directing, etc.) it wasn’t actually bad (except for that evil Tobey McGuire dance scene… *shivers*), but the sum of it’s parts was much greater than the whole. Regardless of the over saturation, and regardless of whether you like the character or not, it was a bad move to include Venom in this movie, especially as weakly as they portrayed him. I, along with many other people, are convinced this is the fault of Sony Pictures for wanting to see a maximum return in their investment, at the cost of the movie’s overall quality. After Spider-Man 3 — although I would have preferred a trilogy only — I felt that Sam should do Spider-Man 4 to come back from what was Spider-Man 3… but only one slight problem: SONY PICTURES.
With Spider-Man 4 in development since 2007, and the actors signing back on to reprise their roles with Raimi’s involvement, production was slated to start this year for a 2011 release. Reports started to arise that there was some sort of hold up with the studio, and then details finally came out that Raimi (once again) was having a disagreement with the studio in regards to villain selection, and story. Raimi wanted either The Vulture, and / or The Lizard to be the focal villains in the movie, but the studio felt they weren’t interesting enough to draw in big crowds (they probably wanted Carnage instead).
Word was released today from Sony that production on Spider-Man 4 has been scrapped, and Raimi will no longer be involved with the project. Instead, Sony Pictures plans on doing a reboot of the series with a whole new cast and crew, for release summer 2012; an absolutely absurd idea if you ask me. In my opinion, this conflict is not the fault of Raimi, nor was Spider-Man 3′s artistic failure his fault either. It’s the fault of Sony Pictures for sacrificing cinematic quality for monetary quantity. It does bum me out a bit that the series will go down like this, much like the X-Men Trilogy at Fox, but I’d rather them scrap it now than add salt to the wound by botching up Spider-Man 4. They shouldn’t be doing a reboot so soon either, but that’s another story.
Raimi is now left to pick up a new project, which as many people know was supposed to be the Warcraft movie after Spider-Man 4 was wrapped. No one is sure if he’ll take on that project now (I hope he does!), or pick up another project, but the right thing was done here in making sure that money wasn’t the driving factor in the movie, as was with Spider-Man 3. Here’s looking forward to Warcraft: The Movie!
Read More: Sam Raimi may not be doing SPIDER-MAN 4 next… but you know what that means…
