Published: The Good Men Project (January 9, 2016)
Okay, I don’t really mean that. There has been so much written about the upcoming Spider-Man movie that I felt a little hyperbole would help attract your attention. If you’re reading this, though, that means I wasn’t wrong… so let me explain why the inclusion of Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe is, in fact, a terrible thing for American culture.
We can start with this thought-provoking observation by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. After observing that the first Back to the Future movie was effective because it helped illustrate the massive cultural evolution that had occurred between the 1950s and the 1980s, he wrote:
“In the original Back to the Future, Marty McFly invaded his father’s sleep dressed as ‘Darth Vader from the planet Vulcan.’ Thirty years later, the biggest blockbuster of 2015 promises to be about . . . Darth Vader’s grandchildren. It will be directed by a filmmaker who’s coming off rebooting . . . Star Trek. And the wider cinematic landscape is defined by . . . the recycling of comic-book properties developed between the 1940s and the 1970s.”
With the release of the new Spider-Man movie, we’re seeing this creative staleness reach a breakneck momentum. The first blockbuster Spider-Man film was released in 2002 (two years after the launching of an X-Men franchise that still continues to this day), and was quickly followed by two successful sequels (one may quibble over the quality of Spider-Man 3, but it was the highest grossing film of 2007). Because Sam Raimi couldn’t meet Sony’s deadline for Spider-Man 4, the franchise wound up being rebooted into The Amazing Spider-Man in 2012.
Just look at those timelines: One new version of the character was introduced in 2002, the next in 2012, and the following one this year. That’s a grand total of fourteen years separating not one but two different incarnations of the same character, less than half the time eclipsed between the release of Back to the Future and it’s exploration of a bygone past only thirty years old.
By reboot, of course, I mean carbon copied, because the notion that The Amazing Spider-Man is anything more than a blatant rip-off of the original 2002 film is laughable. Simply replace Green Goblin with The Lizard, Mary-Jane Watson with Gwen Stacy, and change a few details about minor characters, and boom… You’ve got the exact same movie, plot beat for plot beat. It’s actually in a contract of Mandatory Character Traits that the character must have in every cinematic iteration. “Peter Parker must be a white, heterosexual male with all the basic origin story elements — Aunt May and Uncle Ben, costuming, and life in Queens, New York,” writes Monika Bartyzel of Forbes Magazine. “Spider-Man, meanwhile, has to be a squeaky clean male (no foul language, smoking, drugs, et al) who is not gay, unless Marvel decides to portray a gay alter ego first.”
In an alternate universe somewhere, The Amazing Spider-Man 2 beat American Sniper as the highest grossing film of 2014 and launched an independent cinematic universe to compete with the Marvel and DC cinematic counterparts. In this one, though, that movie was widely considered to be a disappointment, and so now the character is being rebooted yet again.
Needless to say, I wasn’t particularly impressed when the directors of Captain America: Civil War tried to insist that this new version of Spider-Man is incredibly different:
“We had thought back to the things that excited us about him as a character when we were younger, and one of the most important components of that was that he’s a high schooler burdened with incredible powers and responsibility. That really differentiates him from every other character in the Marvel universe as opposed to other superheroes. For us, it was extremely important that we cast somebody very close to the age of a high school student.”
Why isn’t this convincing? Again, it all comes down to the timelines. They may start this character as a high schooler (much as they did, albeit it more briefly, in Spider-Man and The Amazing Spider-Man), but once they start releasing his own movies, his adventures will naturally age him. Eventually they will need to move past the high school angle, and thanks to the aforementioned contract, we know that the same basic story elements present in the first two franchises will have to recur here.
This is why I am deeply discouraged – albeit not catastrophically so – by the fact that we’re getting yet another Spider-Man movie. It seems to confirm that we live at a time when major Hollywood studios are terrified of original ideas… and when audiences, instead of demanding that their highly-paid entertainers take creative risks, are satisfied with simply being fed the same formula with minor tweaks over and over again.
Doesn’t this become insulting at some point?