After five movies starring everyone's favorite wall crawler had come and gone, the future of the Spider-Man franchise was a little up in the air. Mixed reviews and box office receipts that didn't meet expectations were giving the studio a reason to stop and reassess. Now, Spider-Man has a new direction, and the future of the franchise has never looked brighter. Kevin Feige, President of Marvel Studios waxed eloquently in a recent interview about how excited he was at the prospect of giving Spidey a fresh, new start.
“Making that agreement … was great, and was really amazing, and on a personal level making these movies, it means a lot because I think we can do great things with Spider-Man," Feige said.
But another set of standalone movies was not the only thing that Feige and his team of writers had in mind. He went on to talk about how Spider-Man will fit in with the other characters and plotlines in the overall Marvel Universe.
“I think Spider-man can serve great purpose in our universe and that’s where he belongs. That was what was unique about him in the comics was not that he was the only superhero in the world; it’s that he was a totally different kind of superhero when compared against all the other ones in the Marvel universe at the time.”
When the first Spider-man movie came out, the Marvel Universe as we know it today had not yet been invented on the big screen. Spider-Man existed in a singular plane with his villains like the Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Venom and Sandman.
These movies were outstanding at first, and very well received. However, as that particular franchise wore off, the character and the writing simply wore out. The final installment, Spider-Man 3, was so poorly put together that it was widely panned by critics and audiences alike.
The second round of Spidey-films featured Andrew Garfield as the sarcastic teenager that can climb walls. The origin story had to be retold, which was a bit tedious, but the villain was spot on and carried the movie. The Lizard was a great bad-guy to face trying to get this hero back on track.
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Then the sequel of that product line came out. Janie Foxx as a terrible Electro made little sense, and the death of Gwen Stacey shocked and saddened crowds in an unexpected way. The studio must have forgotten that we don't go to these movies to watch the bad guy win and the heroine die.
If we want to watch tragedy, we just need to walk down the street. We watch these movies to escape from our less-than-perfect lives and imagine something better. Hopefully, this new interpretation of Spider-man will keep that in mind.
The studio has already teased at the plotline of the new round of films, saying that they will not be another "origins" story. (Fans all over the world are breathing a sigh of relief as they read this.) In fact, the wall-crawler's return will not happen in a Spider-Man movie at all.
The web-head will make his first official appearance in the upcoming "Captain America: Civil war." Not a bad place to start for a hero looking to take his career on an upswing.
Actor Tom Holland will be taking his first swing at the Spider-Man character in the Captain America follow-up project. Not a bad way to get started in the superhero realm, as he will be co-starring with the cast of the Avengers, plus Black Panther and a few more Marvel mainstays to be released later.
If Tom Holland's Spider-Man can hold his own in the presence of a super-soldier, a billionaire robotics genius and the rightful King of Wakanda, I would say the odds are good that the stand-alone Spider-Man movie scheduled for 2017 will be a success.
