Rise and Fall: The Amazing Spider-Man Series
Hello everyone, and welcome to a new installment of Rise and Fall. This where we take a look at movie franchises that used to be king of the hill, only to hit rock bottom later. And today's Rise and Fall is going to focus one of the worlds most popular superheroes who also happens to be one of my personal favorites of all time. I am talking of course, about your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man.
Folks, I think it's safe to say that somebody like Spidey needs no introduction. He has been a beloved cultural icon for well over 50 years and he's still going strong to this day. And now that he's officially a part of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the wall crawler is on a roll. But there was a time when Spider-Man's cinematic career wasn't doing too well. And we're here to see just how bleak things looked back in the day. So let's get started.
The Origin
After the release of the much maligned Spider-Man 3, there was a lot of turmoil going on at Sony Pictures. The main reason being that the higher ups at Sony meddled with the production of the film, a major result of said meddling being the inclusion of fan favorite Venom, which director Sam Raimi originally didn't even want in the film. The result is that fans and critics alike felt that Venom's inclusion made the film feel bloated along with the many other problems of the movie that I wont go into detail here because we are mainly focusing on the reboot. Despite the negative reception towards Spider-Man 3, Sony still decided to move on with the production of Spider-Man 4 which had an intended release date.
However, Sony would hit yet another bump in the road when they had problems finding a script. Screenwriters Gary Ross, James Vanderbilt, and David Lindsey-Abaire all wrote scripts that were rejected by the studio. Further disagreements between Raimi and Sony threatened to push the films release date back and this made Sony very worried. You see, back in the day when Marvel was about to go bankrupt, they had to sell all of the film rights to their characters off to different movie studios in order to keep the company afloat. Fox got the X-Men and Fantastic Four, Universal got the Hulk, and Sony claimed Spider-Man. The way the movie rights to Marvel characters work is that you either use it or lose it, basically if you don't make a movie about a Marvel character within a specific amount of years, the rights automatically revert back to Marvel themselves. And since the contract for Spider-Man says a film needs to be made every 5 years, the turmoil behind the scenes was just burning daylight for Sony. Thus, on January 11, 2010, Sony announced that they were not going to continue the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films and instead were going to make a full scale continuity reboot with an all new cast and crew to boot (though Avi Arad, Matt Tolmac, and Laura Ziskin who produced the previous filmed stayed to produce).
A few days after Sam Raimi parted ways with Sony for good, Sony announced that Marc Webb would be directing the reboot and that James Horner would be scoring the movie. Later on it was announced that Peter Parker would now be played by Andrew Garfield and instead of using Mary Jane again, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) would instead be the love interest for the reboot, which really got a lot of positive attention from long time Spidey fans.
The Rise
On July 3, 2012, The Amazing Spider-Man was released into theaters. The film received moderately positive feedback from both crtics and fans and managed to gross over $700 million at the box office. Garfield and Stone's chemistry as Peter and Gwen was one of the most praised aspects of the film, which was helped by the fact that Garfield and Stone are dating in real life. Pleased by the success of the reboot, a sequel was inevitably fast tracked for 2014. But despite the positive reaction to TAS, its thunder was mostly stolen that summer due to this little movie that came out two months earlier called The Avengers.
When The Avengers came out, it really changed the landscape of Hollywood as audiences were blown away by the years of build up by the folks at Marvel Studios that led to this one kick ass event film that ultimately proved that yes, a shared movie universe concept can indeed work. As you could guess, when other studios saw the massive success of the Avengers they began to make plans for their own cinematic universes. There was Warner Bros with the DC Extended Universe, Universal trying to revive their classic movie monsters, and of course Sony wanted a piece of that cake as well. And so instead of merely doing another trilogy, they decided to make an entire cinematic universe revolving around Spidey. And this my friends is where things really begin to get messy.
The Fall
When production on the Amazing Spider-Man 2 began, the higher ups at Sony pictures wanted it to be the catalyst for the Spider-Man cinematic universe. This led to a lot of executive meddling behind the scenes as the studio wanted Marc Webb to cut a lot of scenes that would've been connective tissue for future installments such as an entire cut scene with Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson having a conversation. Throughout all the changes that the studio made to the movie, animosity began to build between the cast and crew and the studio executives. All of this came to a head when the film was released on May 2, 2014. Unlike the first film, reception towards the sequel was noticeably alot more mixed to negative among critics, and that's not even getting into the complete vitriol the movie received from fans. Amy Pascal stated numerous times in interviews that she needed The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to gross a billion dollars at the box office in order for the Spider-Man cinematic universe to truly kick off. But of course reality had different plans, as the film only grossed $705 million dollars worldwide.
This really threw a wrench in Sony's plans as now future films such as Sinister Six and The Amazing Spider-Man 3 were now uncertain to begin production. Not helping matters was that Garfield was vocally upset about Sony's handling of the film behind the scenes and it eventually got to the point the higher ups at Sony fired Garfield from the role after he failed to show up to an important executive dinner Sony was having. And to make things even further complicated, Sony got hit by a massive hack attack in November 2014 in retaliation to Sony's comedy The Interview, starring James Franco and Seth Rogen, which tells the story of two men going into North Korea and assassinate Kim Jong-Un. The hack exposed highly confidential emails of Sony Pictures projects and personal information of it's employees. But on the highly confidential side of what was leaked, the public got to get a front row seat of the internal turmoil at the studio and their upcoming Spidey related projects which included a sinister six movie, a venom solo, and a solo about Aunt May. Folks, I wish I was making that last one up.
Not only that but the leaked emails also showed that Kevin Fiege, the head of Marvel Studios, was bending over backwards to help Sony out with the Spider-Man franchise by trying to give them advice what to do and what not to do with certain characters and storylines. But they all fell of deaf ears. In January of 2015, A "Spidey Summit" was held at Sony to discuss Spider-Man's cinematic future and the following month it was announced that Sony and Marvel studios had reached a deal to bring the wall crawler into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by having a new iteration of him appear in Captain America: Civil War and his own solo film later on known as Spider-Man: Homecoming. Thus putting an end to TASM series.
What went wrong?
I think this was Sony's biggest problem when it came to TASM series, and it is that these movies were only made to hold on to the rights. It's literally the exact same reason to why all of those terrible Fantastic Four films were made by Fox. Because Sony decided to blatantly rush these movies out, their quality ultimately suffered. Another reason is a problem Hollywood has with each passing generation and it is trying to hop on a bandwagon. The bandwagon in this case being the cinematic universe trend started by Marvel studios. Warner Bros. has tried with the DC Extended Universe but pretty much every movie released so far (except Wonder Woman) has been poorly received, and Universal's "Dark Universe" that was supposed to begin with last years "The Mummy"was dead on arrival. But Sony's problem with Spider-Man is a different beasts. See for all the problems that the DCEU and the now abandoned "Dark Universe" had, they had one thing that the planned SCU didn't: variety. Those universes had a plethora of different characters with different mythologies of their own so that things could be kept different in each film. Sony on the other hand tried to do a cinematic universe around one character, and that's dumb because by doing that you don't offer much variety.
Furthermore when making a cinematic universe, you have to make sure that the characters that you decide are going to be major players on their own. Just look at Marvel, sure characters like Iron Man, Captain America, and most recently Black Panther, are all Avengers but they can also stand alone in their own corner of the universe whenever they aren't teaming up. In other words, they aren't completely reliant on one another to succeed and they don't necessarily need each other to sell their own stories to the audience. Now had SCU became a thing, this wouldn't be the case. Venom? The Sinister Six? They can't stand on their own because these are characters whose origins are heavily tied to Spider-Man. The reason people want to see these characters is to see how they can challenge the hero. So by making movies of them without Spider-Man, you just sacrificed something that is crucial to the story of these characters.
Finally, another reason why this series failed is the control freak mentality that the higher ups at Sony have had when it comes to this property. Or more accurately the poor decisions made by executive producer Avi Arad. The problems can be rooted all the way back to Spider-Man 3 where it was Arad's executive meddling that led to Venom being shoved into the movie because Arad thought Venom would sell more toys. Thus the films narrative quality suffered for it. And you'd think that Arad would learn from his mistake with Spider-Man 3, but nope! His control freak tendencies ruined yet another movie years later with ASM2 and not only did it alienate audiences but it also ended up killing the franchise. Not to mention Arad is the whole reason why the Sony/Marvel deal almost didn't happen because he was so hellbent on ruling over the franchise with an iron fist. Sure enough, when the Sony deal did come to fruition, Arad was completely left out of the creative loop for Spider-Man's involvement in the MCU and honestly the character is all the better for it.
While Avi Arad was the man that ultimately did get Spider-Man on the silver screen to begin with, he is ultimately more about business than storytelling, and it definitely was reflected with how the final films in both of the previous Spider-Man series turned out. And unfortunately, Arad still refuses to let go with the upcoming Venom film coming out later this year in addition to a Black Cat and Silver Sable team up film currently in development. And guess what? Both of them are completely divorced from Spider-Man, that alone already has audiences doubting the projects. And given Sony's recent cinematic track record with disasters like Pixels, Ghostbusters 2016, and The Emoji Movie, I don't blame people for not trusting Sony. Time will tell how these projects will turn out but at least the future of the wall crawler himself looks brighter than ever.
And that's wraps up another Rise and Fall. And recently there's been news going around that a high grossing and highly reviled franchise is going to be rebooted. So on the next Rise and Fall I'm going to take a look at the robots in disguise.
The Origin
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| Let's take a trip back to the late 2000's shall we? |
After the release of the much maligned Spider-Man 3, there was a lot of turmoil going on at Sony Pictures. The main reason being that the higher ups at Sony meddled with the production of the film, a major result of said meddling being the inclusion of fan favorite Venom, which director Sam Raimi originally didn't even want in the film. The result is that fans and critics alike felt that Venom's inclusion made the film feel bloated along with the many other problems of the movie that I wont go into detail here because we are mainly focusing on the reboot. Despite the negative reception towards Spider-Man 3, Sony still decided to move on with the production of Spider-Man 4 which had an intended release date.
However, Sony would hit yet another bump in the road when they had problems finding a script. Screenwriters Gary Ross, James Vanderbilt, and David Lindsey-Abaire all wrote scripts that were rejected by the studio. Further disagreements between Raimi and Sony threatened to push the films release date back and this made Sony very worried. You see, back in the day when Marvel was about to go bankrupt, they had to sell all of the film rights to their characters off to different movie studios in order to keep the company afloat. Fox got the X-Men and Fantastic Four, Universal got the Hulk, and Sony claimed Spider-Man. The way the movie rights to Marvel characters work is that you either use it or lose it, basically if you don't make a movie about a Marvel character within a specific amount of years, the rights automatically revert back to Marvel themselves. And since the contract for Spider-Man says a film needs to be made every 5 years, the turmoil behind the scenes was just burning daylight for Sony. Thus, on January 11, 2010, Sony announced that they were not going to continue the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films and instead were going to make a full scale continuity reboot with an all new cast and crew to boot (though Avi Arad, Matt Tolmac, and Laura Ziskin who produced the previous filmed stayed to produce).
A few days after Sam Raimi parted ways with Sony for good, Sony announced that Marc Webb would be directing the reboot and that James Horner would be scoring the movie. Later on it was announced that Peter Parker would now be played by Andrew Garfield and instead of using Mary Jane again, Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) would instead be the love interest for the reboot, which really got a lot of positive attention from long time Spidey fans.
The Rise
On July 3, 2012, The Amazing Spider-Man was released into theaters. The film received moderately positive feedback from both crtics and fans and managed to gross over $700 million at the box office. Garfield and Stone's chemistry as Peter and Gwen was one of the most praised aspects of the film, which was helped by the fact that Garfield and Stone are dating in real life. Pleased by the success of the reboot, a sequel was inevitably fast tracked for 2014. But despite the positive reaction to TAS, its thunder was mostly stolen that summer due to this little movie that came out two months earlier called The Avengers.
When The Avengers came out, it really changed the landscape of Hollywood as audiences were blown away by the years of build up by the folks at Marvel Studios that led to this one kick ass event film that ultimately proved that yes, a shared movie universe concept can indeed work. As you could guess, when other studios saw the massive success of the Avengers they began to make plans for their own cinematic universes. There was Warner Bros with the DC Extended Universe, Universal trying to revive their classic movie monsters, and of course Sony wanted a piece of that cake as well. And so instead of merely doing another trilogy, they decided to make an entire cinematic universe revolving around Spidey. And this my friends is where things really begin to get messy.
The Fall
When production on the Amazing Spider-Man 2 began, the higher ups at Sony pictures wanted it to be the catalyst for the Spider-Man cinematic universe. This led to a lot of executive meddling behind the scenes as the studio wanted Marc Webb to cut a lot of scenes that would've been connective tissue for future installments such as an entire cut scene with Gwen Stacy and Mary Jane Watson having a conversation. Throughout all the changes that the studio made to the movie, animosity began to build between the cast and crew and the studio executives. All of this came to a head when the film was released on May 2, 2014. Unlike the first film, reception towards the sequel was noticeably alot more mixed to negative among critics, and that's not even getting into the complete vitriol the movie received from fans. Amy Pascal stated numerous times in interviews that she needed The Amazing Spider-Man 2 to gross a billion dollars at the box office in order for the Spider-Man cinematic universe to truly kick off. But of course reality had different plans, as the film only grossed $705 million dollars worldwide.
This really threw a wrench in Sony's plans as now future films such as Sinister Six and The Amazing Spider-Man 3 were now uncertain to begin production. Not helping matters was that Garfield was vocally upset about Sony's handling of the film behind the scenes and it eventually got to the point the higher ups at Sony fired Garfield from the role after he failed to show up to an important executive dinner Sony was having. And to make things even further complicated, Sony got hit by a massive hack attack in November 2014 in retaliation to Sony's comedy The Interview, starring James Franco and Seth Rogen, which tells the story of two men going into North Korea and assassinate Kim Jong-Un. The hack exposed highly confidential emails of Sony Pictures projects and personal information of it's employees. But on the highly confidential side of what was leaked, the public got to get a front row seat of the internal turmoil at the studio and their upcoming Spidey related projects which included a sinister six movie, a venom solo, and a solo about Aunt May. Folks, I wish I was making that last one up.
Not only that but the leaked emails also showed that Kevin Fiege, the head of Marvel Studios, was bending over backwards to help Sony out with the Spider-Man franchise by trying to give them advice what to do and what not to do with certain characters and storylines. But they all fell of deaf ears. In January of 2015, A "Spidey Summit" was held at Sony to discuss Spider-Man's cinematic future and the following month it was announced that Sony and Marvel studios had reached a deal to bring the wall crawler into the Marvel Cinematic Universe by having a new iteration of him appear in Captain America: Civil War and his own solo film later on known as Spider-Man: Homecoming. Thus putting an end to TASM series.
What went wrong?
I think this was Sony's biggest problem when it came to TASM series, and it is that these movies were only made to hold on to the rights. It's literally the exact same reason to why all of those terrible Fantastic Four films were made by Fox. Because Sony decided to blatantly rush these movies out, their quality ultimately suffered. Another reason is a problem Hollywood has with each passing generation and it is trying to hop on a bandwagon. The bandwagon in this case being the cinematic universe trend started by Marvel studios. Warner Bros. has tried with the DC Extended Universe but pretty much every movie released so far (except Wonder Woman) has been poorly received, and Universal's "Dark Universe" that was supposed to begin with last years "The Mummy"was dead on arrival. But Sony's problem with Spider-Man is a different beasts. See for all the problems that the DCEU and the now abandoned "Dark Universe" had, they had one thing that the planned SCU didn't: variety. Those universes had a plethora of different characters with different mythologies of their own so that things could be kept different in each film. Sony on the other hand tried to do a cinematic universe around one character, and that's dumb because by doing that you don't offer much variety.
Furthermore when making a cinematic universe, you have to make sure that the characters that you decide are going to be major players on their own. Just look at Marvel, sure characters like Iron Man, Captain America, and most recently Black Panther, are all Avengers but they can also stand alone in their own corner of the universe whenever they aren't teaming up. In other words, they aren't completely reliant on one another to succeed and they don't necessarily need each other to sell their own stories to the audience. Now had SCU became a thing, this wouldn't be the case. Venom? The Sinister Six? They can't stand on their own because these are characters whose origins are heavily tied to Spider-Man. The reason people want to see these characters is to see how they can challenge the hero. So by making movies of them without Spider-Man, you just sacrificed something that is crucial to the story of these characters.
Finally, another reason why this series failed is the control freak mentality that the higher ups at Sony have had when it comes to this property. Or more accurately the poor decisions made by executive producer Avi Arad. The problems can be rooted all the way back to Spider-Man 3 where it was Arad's executive meddling that led to Venom being shoved into the movie because Arad thought Venom would sell more toys. Thus the films narrative quality suffered for it. And you'd think that Arad would learn from his mistake with Spider-Man 3, but nope! His control freak tendencies ruined yet another movie years later with ASM2 and not only did it alienate audiences but it also ended up killing the franchise. Not to mention Arad is the whole reason why the Sony/Marvel deal almost didn't happen because he was so hellbent on ruling over the franchise with an iron fist. Sure enough, when the Sony deal did come to fruition, Arad was completely left out of the creative loop for Spider-Man's involvement in the MCU and honestly the character is all the better for it.
While Avi Arad was the man that ultimately did get Spider-Man on the silver screen to begin with, he is ultimately more about business than storytelling, and it definitely was reflected with how the final films in both of the previous Spider-Man series turned out. And unfortunately, Arad still refuses to let go with the upcoming Venom film coming out later this year in addition to a Black Cat and Silver Sable team up film currently in development. And guess what? Both of them are completely divorced from Spider-Man, that alone already has audiences doubting the projects. And given Sony's recent cinematic track record with disasters like Pixels, Ghostbusters 2016, and The Emoji Movie, I don't blame people for not trusting Sony. Time will tell how these projects will turn out but at least the future of the wall crawler himself looks brighter than ever.
And that's wraps up another Rise and Fall. And recently there's been news going around that a high grossing and highly reviled franchise is going to be rebooted. So on the next Rise and Fall I'm going to take a look at the robots in disguise.
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