Spider-Man 4 Scrapped, Franchise Reboot Planned 536
derGoldstein writes "Yesterday we discussed which sci-fi should get the reboot treatment next. If you consider Spider-Man as 'proper sci-fi,' then it would appear that's the answer. 'Sony Pictures decided today to reboot the Spider-Man franchise after Sam Raimi pulled out of Spider-Man 4 because he felt he couldn't make its summer release date and keep the film's creative integrity. This means that Raimi and the cast including star Tobey Maguire are out. There will be no Spider-Man 4. Instead, the studio will focus on a reboot script by Jamie Vanderbilt with a new director and a new cast.'"
Perhaps Raimi is too busy working on other projects.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:5, Insightful)
reboot to match todays youth preferences: think twilight in 3d.
Problem is: (Score:5, Insightful)
They can't wait years, or the rights revert to Marvel (Disney). They'd rather crank out anything to keep them.
...why? (Score:2, Insightful)
It's rather annoying that so many franchises and movies are getting the reboot/rewrite treatment. It's almost like Hollywood is afraid that most multimillon dollar investments won't turn a buck.
Oh,wait....
BTW, I thought the Batman reboot was needed but am not ashamed to say I loved the first hulk (Eric Bana not Nick Cage). Hulk was never really about mass destruction,as awesome as it is to watch, but his inner conflict.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:2, Insightful)
Amazing how bond could go 30+ years (Score:4, Insightful)
and these days they make it about 9.
I think it is partially the fact that they are using very young actors.
Of course, part of that is the comic book universe's problem.
Spider man was 18-26 for 40 years. In "reality", spider man in the comics should be in his late 60's.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reboot how? (Score:5, Insightful)
'Reboot,' in Hollywood-speak, means "Forget cannon. Forget the comics. Forget everything. Get a focus group of our target demographic and ask them what they want. Get a committee of corporate hack writers to write what's going to sell." Hollywood is lazy and incredibly risk-averse. They do not create art, they create vapid, bland, and safe pablum for the masses. They take art, and turn it into raw sewage. The occasional good movie that slips out is an anomaly. They will then take that rare good movie and turn it into raw sewage in sequels. Hollywood wants to create the sure thing, the thing that everyone will pay to see. They don't want to take risks on stories no one's heard of before, so the will continue raping the corpse of any successful franchise until the fans turn away in horror. Then they will 'reboot' its desecrated corpse.
spiderman (Score:5, Insightful)
The first one wasn't bad, it just wasn't great. Worst casting choice was who they got to play Peter Parker. He's not a complicated character! He's a science nerd, yes. He's smart. He's also helplessly introverted. The introduction of the spiderman character to his life creates an alter ego. And this is where he cuts loose, being the irreverent, humorous wall-crawler of page and screen. That Toby McGuire guy could do mumbly and introverted but nothing else. This is not complex storytelling, folks. This is basic heroic mythmaking that goes all the way back to the paleolithic campfire. Hero good. Bad guy bad, but maybe have a beef we could sympathize with. Hero has a girl and he gets her in the end. And given the nature of the character, there should be plenty of laughs.
And for the sequels, all the stuff that was bad about the first movie was expanded upon. Spiderman 3 approached epic awful comic book movie status. Bad for the franchise but great for rifftrax.
The recent Iron Man movie was an example of how to do this. Perfectly crafted popcorn fare. Great characters, great lines, good 'splosions. Hope they don't screw the next one up.
Oh, and one quibble. So the Goblin guy from the first film had a super-serum and so became super-human. He can trade punches with super-human people because he's super-durable. I can buy that. Same goes for Goblin jr. But Doc Oc, he's just a dude with creepy robot arms. Even if those robot arms can kick eight kinds of ass, the guy they're attached to is still a flabby middle-aged science guy. Our friendly neighborhood spiderman is super-strong and a punch from him should cause disfiguring if not immediately fatal injuries. The guy's strong enough to hold up a frickin' cable car. His punch should be like from that freeway accident in Final Destination, where the log truck drops its load and this guy looks up just in time to see a 20 foot log come flying right through his windshield. We're talking a punch from a super-human should cause the head to shatter like a melon dropped from a six story building, a red mist everywhere, the now mostly headless body dropping while blood goes squirting everywhere. Ok, so that would completely screw the PG-13 rating but c'mon, seeing a podgy scientist shrug off those punches makes spiderman look lamer than Toby himself is managing.
Re:Thank you... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's just getting ridiculuous now though. We're getting into 2nd and 3rd gen reboots where we're rebooting series that have already been rebooted. It wouldn't surprise me one bit if a Hulk reboot was announced next year.
How many times do we want to see the same freaking origin story?
Who wants to place bets that we'll see a Lord of the Rings "reboot" within 10 years?
Reward failure, punish success (Score:5, Insightful)
Each film made near a billion dollars. Raimi fought with the studios over the script for 3, which was terrible. So now the studio is forcing the same writer for 4, and gave him a contract to write future Spider-man movies as well. Let's keep the guy who wrote a TERRIBLE script, and punish a much-loved and successful director.
As Kevin Smith said, in Hollywood, you fail upwards.
I'm not suggesting that everything Raimi did was perfect, but when Spider-man 2 was released, many hailed it as the best superhero film of all time.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:4, Insightful)
That would be way too implausible, even for the Spider-Man movies; a high school kid develops something that material scientists would take years to create in a high-tech lab if they could at all?
Re:...why? (Score:2, Insightful)
The Batman reboot was probably the most successful I've ever seen. Mind you, each time they make a sequel, they risk screwing the pooch. Spiderman 3 was certainly the weakest of the three, but still, I didn't think it was that bad, but who knows, Spiderman 4 might have been a gawdawful mess. I have the same fears for Batman, which took a franchise that had been completely fucked up from the moment they picked Michael Keaton to play Bruce Wayne/Batman, and had only gone down hill from there, and transformed it into something completely different, and in a way, far more in line with the original conception. If the third movie sucks, then they've taken a wondrous thing and turned it to shit.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
Warner Brothers flat out said the next Superman needed to be dark and mimic The Dark Knight. Apparently they can't grasp that Superman and Batman are different characters.
Robert Pattison (or whatever that Twilight actor's name) is likely the next, emo, brooding, dark Peter Parker.
Who cares about Tobey McGuire? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Amazing how bond could go 30+ years (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. The problem is that if they had comic book characters age appropriately, it would destroy the storylines. An arc that takes 2 years would not be possible in a comic involving a teenager. Gaps between arcs are a bit better.
For more info, see the disaster behind Marvel's New Universe from the mid 80s. Having a month of real time between issues killed the entire line of comic books.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:5, Insightful)
God forbid they breach the cannon of Spider-Man.
"Reboot" means what it means, no more, no less. The last comic-book reboot was Batman Begins, a full-hearted plunge into the spirit and fiction of the original that terminated an increasingly lost and bewildered series of films.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Reward failure, punish success (Score:5, Insightful)
Kevin Smith's problem isn't failure. All of his films turn a profit, and then sell like mad on DVD. He doesn't make 200 million in the box office, but he almost always shoots with a very low budget.
There is something to be said for a director who always turns a profit. Kevin Smith will never make a billion dollar picture like The Dark Knight, be he also won't lose you 200 million on a failed tent-pole.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:4, Insightful)
i'm getting tired of this narrative (Score:5, Insightful)
i agree with every single one of your points, and yet fail to find what the problem is. we're talking about ENTERTAINMENT. empty, pointless, useless, entertainment. of course, with that statement i am precluding the possibility of something transformational. the original star wars, for instance, is a silly space opera, and yet, including for me, its been a source of much love and awe
however, as it has degraded into a weekly animation on the cartoon network with a IM-speak trash talking teenage padawan, i find i can't hold that against lucas, not even his 3 prequels. why?
because nothing lasts forever. you fall in love with something, and it changes. there's no way around this. getting frustrated about this fact of life will not change this fact of life
a lot of fan boys need to come to grips with the fact that nothing lasts forever, that everything degrades in quality over time, and that's just the way it is, and always will be
and that hollywood, milking the cow, rebooting a desecrated corpse, is business as usual, and always will be. you need to move on and find love for some other scifi franchise when your much loved series jumps the shark. railing against the world when that happens is just pointless sour grapes and wasted effort on your part
stop hating hollywood. just realize what is inevitable in this world and realize when it is time to move on
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's one of the reasons I enjoy anime TV series and manga. Many times they have a single story, they tell it, and it's over. Just look at things like Cowboy Bebop, Full Metal Alchemist, etc.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:5, Insightful)
It goes deeper than that.
Removal of mechanical web shooters (and Peter's bug/trackers that key to his "spider sense") are examples of the shift of Spider Man's portrayal of science as a neutral force used by both good and evil, to an evil corrupting influence that only those of exceptional character can withstand.
In the comics (and 60's TV show) Peter is a budding scientist that becomes a superhero. His foes that use science/technology are already well on the path to "evil" long before they encounter the circumstances that turn them into supervillains. Science is portrayed as a neutral force that can be harnessed by good and evil alike.
In the movies, Peter is just a "nerd" who gets corrupted by science, and it's only by indirectly causing the death of his uncle that he gains the moral character to overcome the corrupting influence of science and become a force for good - although it's a battle he has to wage constantly. His foes? They are all good-natured individuals that become evil only because of the corrupting influence of science. Some are able to eventually fight the evil of science and become good again, and prove they are good by sacrificing themselves at the last minute.
I sincerely hope that any "reboot" of the series will bring back the tone of the comics.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not only that, but it was probably the first Superhero live action movie since the first Superman: The Movie to be pretty good...
After all the sucky superhero movies, Spiderman showed us you can actually do these things "right," leading to the newer Batman, Superman, and even a MUCH better Hulk movie, and Iron Man.
I'm not a huge comic fan, so I know those hardcore fans whine about things not being exactly right (and hey, keep whining, I've got no problem with that), so I pretty much enjoyed them.
But Spiderman was done right... even 2 and 3 were pretty good, so I think this is pretty sad.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
Not to mention, Supes never lifts anything with TK once that I've seen. And if his powers were purely mental and simply believing in them, then he wouldn't be powered by the sun.
Re:Amazing how bond could go 30+ years (Score:3, Insightful)
The real problem has nothing to do with the actors. It's everything to do with Raimi wanting one movie, and the studio wanting a different movie. They want to make sure their cash cow is adequately milked, whereas Raimi wants good milk. Spidey 1 & 2 worked well, though apparently the whole Venom arc in 3 was put in at the insistence of the studio. Raimi, not liking that, did a half-assed job anyhow.
This time around, he said "I want to do X" they said "No, you'll do Y", he said "no" and they started looking for someone who would do as they were told.
Re:Thank you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Who wants to place bets that we'll see a Lord of the Rings "reboot" within 10 years?
Another LoTR adaptation in 10 years is a remake, not a reboot. Unless if you're thinking to redo the storyline or characters...
you're cute ;-) (Score:3, Insightful)
blade runner was produced through the ladd company (warner bros)
2001 was MGM
sideways was michael london, straightup hollywood producer
all of your charlie kaufman fanboy stuff: synechdoche, adaptation, being john malkovich, eternal sunshine, adaptation... hollywood produced/ distributed. charlie kaufman is straightup hollywood, he lives in pasadena and has toiled in hollywood long before his fame
brazil is the brits and terry gilliam, so i'll give you that
lost in translation is goddamn sofia coppola, which is about as nepotistically hollywood as you can possibly get
why are you such an angry little man with such a huge chip on your shoulder, yet coupled with such a poor understanding of the subject matter you inject your uneducated superiority into? you do understand the idea of production and distribution, don't you?
by your list of movies, your taste is solidly mainstream. it has that obvious stink of "i'm a suburban wannabe who buys what hollywood has marketed as 'upscale'", but this is a personality issue, not an aesthetic mark of exception. you know, for suburban douches who imagine themselves alternative, but are just another marketing segment that the hollywood dvd aftermarket panders to. sorry kid, but your tastes solidly describe you as middle of the road. it sounds like you hit the goddamn netflix "suggest other movies like this one" to make your list. you forgot "american beauty" lol
i would be worried if you responded to my challenge with a bunch of japanese or korean or indian fare, you know, clearly not hollywood, clearly intelligent, vibrant, and utterly alien to hollywood mass-produced stuff
start in japan kid. judging by your style of taste in hollywood fare, i suggest something like "love exposure" from the genius sion sono, or "fine, totally fine", which you will love if you liked sideways
then get on over to korea. see something like the sublime "M", which rivals kubrick at his best in terms of being transcendent, or then anything by mark chanwook (probably outside your tastes though). and there's always plenty in europe
there are people who are genuinely counterculture. then there are people who have pretensions and a false sense of superiority. this is a character weakness, not a mark of aesthetic exception. you're a strange little suburban angry douche. i hear the voice of squidward in spongebob squarepants when i read your comment
oops! sorry if that's too "idiocracy" a reference for you! thinking of a children cartoon character? obviously i am not a intelligent culture vulture like yourself!
lol! cute little angry man
Re:Reboot how? (Score:5, Insightful)
At least twilight didn't take an existing character and castrate him like spiderman 3 did.
Ahem...
Emo sparkly vampires
Vampires don't sparkle in sun light, they burn. Taking away one of the most defining characteristics of vampires is sort of like castrating them.
Re:You Have No Idea (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm sure they can make one based on the P-P-P-Powerbook - http://www.zug.com/pranks/powerbook/ [zug.com]
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
Okay. So Lois had her memory wiped by Superman after sleeping with him. That lets her off the hook a bit, but makes Superman even more of a nasty piece of work. But like you say, there's no reference to this in the film so people like me who don't know the previous films (and I'd imagine the kids that are a primary audience for this film mostly get included in that) have no way to know this. Still, even allowing this, she hooked up with James Marsden quickly enough that she thought it was his child. So they surely must have been seeing each other during the events of when she slept with Superman. Okay - I suppose it's possible she wasn't. She gets her memory wiped, goes out meets this guy, they have sex and 'whoops - I'm pregnant'. Okay, she gets a pass on that (and bonus points for James Marsden for doing the honourable and marrying his one-night stand). Her behaviour during the movie isn't exactly virtuous. But still, thanks for clearing that up.
I'm taking your word for this, mind you. I'm not being distrustful. But I remember Luthor waving the green rock at the kid and seeing the kid flinch and him asking whose kid this is. That happens after the child has displayed his powers, does it? The first thing I remember of that is him throwing a piano at someone which I thought was later? I've probably missed something. All I really remember from the film was Superman's behaviour, the utter stupidity of Luthor's plan (I'm going to kill millions and then go into real estate) and that the overall message of the movie seems to be that you can beat any problem with brute force if you just pull a constipated face whilst your lifting the continent you're allergic to into space.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think Luthor suspects the kid, but it has been a while since I seen Returns.
Singer said publicly that he was making his film as a direct sequel to Superman 1 and 2, but not really considering 3 and 4. Those movies are fairly old, and if you didn't see them, I guess it wouldn't be pretty clear where the kid came from, or why Lois didn't know.
Superman 2 is a great film, and held up (even today, though it is a little slow by modern standards) by some as the best superhero film of all time. I'll take Dark Knight, but Superman 2 is worth watching at least once. I assume most geeks have seen it.
that's a lot of deflection (Score:3, Insightful)
and a complete 180 from your comments above like the one where you cite 'idiocracy'
"I, on the other hand, respect people, and feel they can handle art that isn't pre-digested for them"
no, you, on the other hand, are so condescending and patronizing you can't even see it in your own words, where you prejudge what they like as something that you see a need to be improved upon, based on nothing but your own self-certain sense of knowing what is "better" for them. what is "better" for them, apparently being your own arbitrary likes. this is a pure definition of being self-centered, superior minded
charlie kaufman is awesome, and i loved eternal sunshine and have it on dvd and have enthused about it and suggested college aged visitors watch it with me and they loved it. not because i was improving them, condescendingly, as you portray your noble one man crusade, but just because i wanted to share with my equals. i don't think my love for that movie is the basis upon which to judge what other people like and i don't have a need to "show them the light". you do. you do because you have a false sense of superiority based on nothing but your arbitrary proclivities for hollywood mass marketed alternative movies. you're a fucking poster boy for self important small minded suburban rec room elitism
i realize that the complete aboutface and backtracking on your own statements in your comment immediately above is about as close as i am going to get with you admitting you are wrong, and that i have made my point, so whatever
adios! sorry i can't say well met, self-centered, patronizing little man
xoxoxoxoxox
Re:Reboot how? (Score:3, Insightful)
It's well known that Superman is a dick. [superdickery.com]
Okay. So Lois had her memory wiped by Superman after sleeping with him.
Yeah, the events of Superman 2 were really messed up. Lois finds out Clark is superman, he gets rid of his powers to stay with her, they sleep together, other Kryptonian survivors appear and they're all evil ("Kneel before Zod"), so Superman has to go regain his powers and fight them.
All the while, Lois gets kidnapped because Luthor knows Superman has a thing for her, but she still tries to protect Superman (and his secret, she knows his secret identity at this point) with no regard for her own life. To repay her for this, Superman erases her memory at the end of the movie. I'm sure he's telling himself it's for her own good, but we all know that's bull. Luthor knew to kidnap her, and he wasn't even aware of how far their relationship had gone. She's still in danger, just for being the reporter that knows Superman the best.
But I remember Luthor waving the green rock at the kid and seeing the kid flinch and him asking whose kid this is. That happens after the child has displayed his powers, does it? The first thing I remember of that is him throwing a piano at someone which I thought was later?
The piano did happen later. Luthor waved the Kryptonite for the same reason he had Lois kidnapped in Superman 2. He knows the two have a relationship, he's just not sure how far this has gone. He also figured that the kid is old enough to have been conceived before Superman went away, which is why he asks about the kid's age.
All I really remember from the film was Superman's behaviour, the utter stupidity of Luthor's plan (I'm going to kill millions and then go into real estate) and that the overall message of the movie seems to be that you can beat any problem with brute force if you just pull a constipated face whilst your lifting the continent you're allergic to into space. :(
The movie sucked. Bryan Singer was obviously a fan, but he's a fan of the wrong Superman. The early post-crisis Superman is the interesting one. His powers are nerfed somewhat, which means he's actually in danger of dying from things other than Kryptonite. He considers his identity of Clark Kent to be his real identity, and Superman to be the fake one. That makes him easier to relate to, and it means the Clark persona isn't an idiot who is constantly messing up everyday tasks. The Lois and Clark TV series really is what got the closest to a good live-action interpretation of Superman (and that's saying a lot, because it really wasn't that good). Everything else has sucked.
Re:Reboot how? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, I've never bought a comic book in my life, and I care about relative believability.
It's not just a problem in comic book movies. Every movie you go in needing to accept some (often ludicrous) premise. Heaping coincidences and other unlikelinesses on top of that premise weakens the movie.
For instance, I watched "Untraceable" the other night. It asks you to accept the title premise, that somehow this particular killer's web feed is really untraceable, despite it being easily routed by the internet DNS servers (not to go into details, here, but they pseudo-explain this by saying he's broadcasting his source feed to a bunch of botnet drones, and the DNS entries re changing the one web site URL to a different drone with every request, and for some unexplained reason they can't just bring one of these drones in to see where it is getting it's feed from). Since it's the title of the movie, and I already groaned when I saw that in the trailer, I accepted it. And since it's a serial killer movie, I also accepted that the killer had some unnatural set of skills at hacking bits and hacking people. That's premise. And it's a whopper of a premise, already pushing the boundaries of acceptability. Note: spoilers of a bad movie follow. But then the writers throw in every possible serial killer movie cliche coincidence: the FBI agent who is meticulous about everything lets her daughter surf the net and download apps from "friends" to run on her (presumably secured) home machine which also happens to have all her FBI files sitting on it unprotected; the other FBI agent engaging in blind Internet dates gets targeted by the killer right when he happens to figure out the key to the case; said FBI agent calls heroine but instead of telling her the key to the case tells her he'll tell her later, right before he is snatched by the killer, and the "key" turns out to be two words which he "blinks" in morse code to her; another FBI agent who knows morse code sees the internet-dating agent blinking and "knows" that left eye is dot and right dash so he can get those two words written down .... blah blah blah. At this point, you've blown past the premise and the movie is schlock.
As a general rule, since you asked, a good non-absurdist story will have a central premise of a single unlikely event, perhaps two (kid bitten by spider gets special powers; world is going to end in 2012), and other unlikely events either follow naturally from that one unlikely event or spring from the same cause as the first unlikely event. In today's movie, it is rare for that premise event not to be spelled out in the trailer, so you are guaranteed that the folks who are sitting in the seats have either accepted the premise or are placating someone who accepted the premise. Once the premise has been accepted, additional unrelated unlikely events (various other superheroes/villains spawning due to unrelated accidents; guy happening to come across all the information the 2012 guy comes across AND happens to survive everything even though the information he came across played no part in that, etc) weaken the story, bringing the viewer back "out of" the story.
Again, you don't need to be a comic book geek to care about this. It's a central characteristic of all good non-absurdist writing, that aside from the premise, all facts are internally consistent and believable.
"Absurdist" writing (say, just about anything from Chuck Palahniuk) is the exception, here, as the unlikeliness of what follows is the entire point.