The Amazing Spider Man 2 (2014)

[Bardoon]

I don't blame Webb. It's mostly the writers, producers (Arad perhaps?) and Sony and essentially what they did was Spider-man 3 Lite. Just like they did with Spider-man 3 and Sam Raimi, they forced themselves "too much" into the movie and they've "paid" for it twice and will hopefully learn their lesson. I still don't know why that even with Raimi on board Spidey 3 and giving in to allow Venom into the film, he still allowed the ridiculousness of emo-Peter in essentially was an embarrassment to the Symbiote character in the first place...in my opinion.

However, your point is moot in saying Marc Webb has the "keys" to the kingdom. A lot of the comic book directors don't have "huge" success behind them when they've been asked to do these movies.

-Brian Singer's biggest hits before "X-Men" was the Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil. He only directed THREE movies and ONE short before handling "X-Men".
-Joss Whedon, everyone's favorite "nerd" director only directed ONEEEE...ONE movie before given "The Avengers". Can you guess it? Yeah. Serenity. Yes, he did direct lots of TV beforehand, very similar to....
-Alan Taylor, who directed "Thor: the Dark World", has directed MOSTLY TV and two little known films YEARS before doing Thor.
-James Gunn....directed the "dark comedy" Super in 2010 and "Slither" before that....he's known for horror/comedy writing credits.
-The Russo bros. who did "The Winter Soldier"...are known for TV and "You, me and Dupree".....really?
-Shane Black, who directed the BILLION DOLLAR GROSSING Iron Man 3 hadn't done a movie since 2005 and that was "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang".

I like Marc Webb because he has been great at directing the "characters" and getting a cast together that in my opinion has better chemistry than the Raimi trilogy. Is he under the whim of Sony and the producers more so than Raimi? Yes, perhaps so. But he's also responsible for what I believe is the BEST interpretation of Spider-man on-screen we've ever seen. I think he deserves and has proven he can do an AMAZING job with Spider-man, the problem is when he is shoved with doing so much in so little and THAT is the fault of Sony and the producers...NOT the director. Because Raimi caved to the same pressure that Webb perhaps was dealing with.

 

[jye4ever]

What an article.

P.S. DiFabio was right, read on:


It's easy to look at the $630 million earned globally by The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and assume it's doing pretty well. I mean, that's a lot of money. It's hard to deny that six hundred million dollars is an awful lot of money, and they still have some money left to make. The film will probably end up slightly north of $700 million global, with a domestic take right around $200 million. It's not impossible that the film makes less than $200 million domestic, but I imagine Sony will do what Warner Bros did with Superman Returns back in the day and basically will it over that line by keeping it in theaters forever. Maybe they'll do what Paramount does and rerelease the film with added footage (enough was cut from the movie) or a tease or something to eke out the remaining dollars needed to hit that arbitrary line.


Here's the reality: anything under $200 million domestic is embarrassing, and even slightly over $200 million is kind of a black eye. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues the steady, steady decline in domestic box office for the Spider-Man series, with none of the films ever coming close to the 2002 orginal's enormous box office. That was a movie that set records, that helped change the definitions of blockbuster business, and set a bar that seems impossible for the franchise to clear. Here's how they've all done, domestic:


Spider-Man $403.7m


Spider-Man 2 $373.5m


Spider-Man 3 $336.5m


The Amazing Spider-Man $262m


The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (to date) $172m


It's almost guaranteed that ASM2 will come in fifty to sixty million bucks lower than the reboot, which was already seventy million bucks off the last film - despite being in 3D and despite promising a change from that disliked entry. If this arc holds up we're looking at an Amazing Spider-Man 3 that earns maybe $150 million, which is absolutely terrible.


The global box office is harder to track across all five films; the global marketplace has exploded in the 12 years since the first movie was released. What we can do is see that the reboot made $752 million globally, and that Sony was feeling so confident in this new film that they in-house projected it to reach one billion dollars, that new global magic supernumber. I remember when a movie making $100 million domestic was a big deal - now that's an opening weekend! One billion bucks is where it is when it comes to these mega-franchises.


The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will not make one billion dollars.


I don't like writing about box office for a few reasons. One is that I hate boiling all this art down to some horrible commerce ********. But let's be real - these blockbuster movies are commerce into which, hopefully, some art is smuggled. That's why I tend to get really excited about a movie like Godzilla that is just wonderfully made, because it would have been easy to just churn it out and count the money. But the other reason I don't like writing about box office is that nobody really understands it. Box office is way more complicated than it looks, and there's a cabal of number wizards deep inside the studio basement who are chanting around an eldritch dollar sign and they're the only guys who really see the whole picture.


Even figuring out what a movie needs to make to be successful is hard; there are theater splits and marketing partners and prints and advertising costs and ancillary revenue streams - there's a lot of stuff that happens that we don't know about, a lot of numbers that get juggled to keep it all obscure from people whose contracts include a piece of the profit. What we can go by - and what counts for more than you think - is the perception.


That story I linked, about Sony wanting to make a billion bucks on The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that's a weird story because everybody wants to make a billion bucks. Either Sony leaked that to show their confidence in the film or someone else leaked it to make them look bad because it was becoming apparent from tracking that they weren't going to hit that number. The important thing to know is that Sony wanted to make a billion dollars with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, everybody heard that was what they wanted, and they're not going to get it. The other important thing is to look at the trend of box office and see how it is sketching out a graph that is headed down and you understand what Sony's executives are thinking right now:


"How do we fix this?"


This is supposed to be the part where I jump in and have my nerdy answers, but the reality is that I just don't know. I look at these numbers and I begin to think that maybe the story being told is that the public isn't that wildly interested in seeing Spider-Man on screen. His adventures, by their nature, have a bit of samey-ness to them. This doesn't bode well for Sony's plan to spin off a whole bunch of franchises from old Web-head.


They're not going to get rid of Marc Webb, and I don't think they should. They bought him out of his Fox contract so he could be their Spider-godfather (that's why there was an X-Men: Days of Future Past teaser in the credits of The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and he's a fine director. He just keeps having these godawful scripts.


They're not going to get rid of Andrew Garfield, that's for sure. He's the best part of this new series - well, except for Emma Stone, but they killed her off.


They're not going to reboot again because Jesus Christ, how horrible would that be?


I think they're going to back off the expanded universe idea. There's barely an appetite for Spider-Man, so what interest is there in his villains? I want only the best for Drew Goddard, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that Sinister Six, previously scheduled to shoot in January, sort of fades away. Sony needs to focus on The Amazing Spider-Man 3 first, and any good ideas that could have gone into a Sinister Six movie should get folded into the third film. In fact it seems absolutely bizarre to me that there was going to be a Sinister Six before The Amazing Spider-Man 3, considering what a ****** job The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did setting them up.


They're likely going to dip into the most popular villain well again. Will they repeat the sins of the Sam Raimi era and throw Venom into The Amazing Spider-Man 3? This is just visionless enough a franchise for me to believe it. Perhaps they'll go into the Clone Saga, which would allow them to bring Emma Stone back. It's already obvious that killing off Gwen Stacy at this point in the series was a mistake (not just in terms of severing the chemistry she has with Garfield but in terms of setting up the death of a Stacy as the cheap plot device they go to in each film. People are joking about which remaining Stacy family members die in the next entry).


What they won't do is find a good script. Every element is in place in the Amazing Spider-Man movies except for the scripts. These have been bad films from a basic structural place; they're using the best construction materials but are following ****** blue prints. I truly believe that if Webb and his team cracked a great script they could reverse the Spider-Man trend.


Or maybe that won't be enough. Maybe it really is simply Spider-Man's fault. Maybe swinging through the city five times was enough for audiences - they've seen it already.


My advice? Scale it back. Stop making these movies for $250 million each. Tell a street-level story that sheds a lot of light on Peter Parker, not his dad or Norman Osborn or anything like that. Have Spidey up against the Sin Eater or in the middle of a gang war (you can even keep Osborn in the picture by having OsCorp tech getting into gang hands). Tell a story about how hard it is for Peter Parker to juggle life as Pete and life as Spidey, something these new films has totally ignored. Bring back the old Parker luck, have Pete be broke, have Aunt May be sick, have J Jonah Jameson turn the city against him (use the death of Gwen as a catalyst). Definitely drop all the dad stuff - that's been wrapped up enough to ignore it from here on out.


Most importantly, restore to Spider-Man his true reason for being: the understanding that with great power comes great responsibility. That's why Spider-Man is a hero, not because he inspires people as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 wrongly gets it, but because he knows he has a responsibility to the world. His powers make Peter Parker not a superman but a servant of the people, a truly blue collar hero who is just there to help, not to clean up the mess made by his dad. Find that aspect of Spider-Man, the side of him that has moved readers for almost sixty years, and you can save this franchise.


Let's assume the Amazing Spider-Man franchise can be saved. What would you do? What's your big recommendation to Sony to bring this series back? Difficulty level: you can't tell them to sell Spidey back to Marvel.

 

[Bardoon]

Nice column jye, I completely agree with it. They have all the right pieces in place, a great director, a solid crew, excellent casting...they just need a STRONG, BALANCED script. I like the idea of a "grounded" flick like it mentions, but still feel you can bring a strong villain (like Vulture or Kraven) into play.

I would bring back Felicia and introduce her as the Black Cat. Since they have the humor of Spidey down, and you now have a troubled, heartbroken Parker, bringing in Black Cat can help lighten his heart a bit as she matches the "playful" side of Spider-man. Perhaps he busts her in a crime and she reveals her infatuation with him and "forces" herself to tag along as his "sidekick" (while still stealing and not telling Spidey). On the flip-side for Peter himself, you can introduce Mary Jane. I hope they can find someone to match the chemistry between Garfield and Stone but this plays RIGHT into Marc Webb's strength. That way, you have the interesting dynamics of Spidey's "romance" with Black Cat and Parker's growing interest with Mary Jane and how he balances the two. In the shadows, then you have Goblin perhaps masterminding his Sinister Six and starting with Kraven. Adapt some material from "Kraven's Last Hunt" and I think you can form a solid, "grounded" Spidey. And it can work as a more balanced and personal film about Kraven hunting Spider-man (instead of Spidey "saving" NYC again), and Parker dealing with the troubles of being BOTH Peter Parker and Spider-man but learning that it's alright for him to be both.

 

[Chapter 2099]

That is too long of a post, jye.

All I care about is the Bluray release date of this one? Is that mentioned in the article??? j/k

 

[Bmutha]

Nice rant, jye4ever.

Not sure how to fix it. I enjoyed ASM2, but I recognize that audiences may be getting bored...I think you nailed it with the "samey-ness" comment.

It's too bad that they make every single villain find out that Parker is Spider-Man, because I think his identity could have been used to make a unique villain. That's what made Venom such an interesting villain to me early on (thinking about ASM 315-317, one of my favorite arcs ever)...Brock knew everything about Peter because the symbiote had his memories.

They need to somehow come up with a unique villain. Vulture, Rhino, Electro, Sandman etc are all fairly derivative.

With the right story, I think maybe Mysterio could be used pretty effectively...playing some serious mind games with Peter.

 

[jye4ever]

That is too long of a post, jye.

All I care about is the Bluray release date of this one? Is that mentioned in the article??? j/k

 

[The Amazing Spider-Man]

If they make the love stories take a backseat for once, create fight scenes longer than 2 minutes, and have action occur throughout the movie instead of every 50 minutes, they'll take a step in the right direction. The last thing we need is another love story based spider-man movie bouncing off the walls with his dads lame ass secrets no one gives a damn about.

 

[The Phantom]

I don't blame Webb. It's mostly the writers, producers (Arad perhaps?) and Sony and essentially what they did was Spider-man 3 Lite. Just like they did with Spider-man 3 and Sam Raimi, they forced themselves "too much" into the movie and they've "paid" for it twice and will hopefully learn their lesson. I still don't know why that even with Raimi on board Spidey 3 and giving in to allow Venom into the film, he still allowed the ridiculousness of emo-Peter in essentially was an embarrassment to the Symbiote character in the first place...in my opinion.

However, your point is moot in saying Marc Webb has the "keys" to the kingdom. A lot of the comic book directors don't have "huge" success behind them when they've been asked to do these movies.

-Brian Singer's biggest hits before "X-Men" was the Usual Suspects and Apt Pupil. He only directed THREE movies and ONE short before handling "X-Men".
-Joss Whedon, everyone's favorite "nerd" director only directed ONEEEE...ONE movie before given "The Avengers". Can you guess it? Yeah. Serenity. Yes, he did direct lots of TV beforehand, very similar to....
-Alan Taylor, who directed "Thor: the Dark World", has directed MOSTLY TV and two little known films YEARS before doing Thor.
-James Gunn....directed the "dark comedy" Super in 2010 and "Slither" before that....he's known for horror/comedy writing credits.
-The Russo bros. who did "The Winter Soldier"...are known for TV and "You, me and Dupree".....really?
-Shane Black, who directed the BILLION DOLLAR GROSSING Iron Man 3 hadn't done a movie since 2005 and that was "Kiss Kiss Bang Bang".

I like Marc Webb because he has been great at directing the "characters" and getting a cast together that in my opinion has better chemistry than the Raimi trilogy. Is he under the whim of Sony and the producers more so than Raimi? Yes, perhaps so. But he's also responsible for what I believe is the BEST interpretation of Spider-man on-screen we've ever seen. I think he deserves and has proven he can do an AMAZING job with Spider-man, the problem is when he is shoved with doing so much in so little and THAT is the fault of Sony and the producers...NOT the director. Because Raimi caved to the same pressure that Webb perhaps was dealing with.

Look at the directors you named.

Before Bryan Singer directed X-Men, he had a big payday with "The usual suspects".

Now the studio would look at that and think, "OK this guy is good working with an ensemble cast, let's bring him in and see what he has to say about this". Now believe me, I'm not giving any of the studio guys the benefit of the doubt. If BS was able to BS then he's going to get the gig.

Thor and Captain America? I don't know what the studio saw in those directors, I wasn't in the room. But evidently it worked out better then the first time around. Both of those movies did better in round 2. Kenneth Braughn and Joe Johnston can't say that.

Shane Black? Good friends with RDJ, and wrote the "Lethal Weapon" films, not exactly a piker.

Joss? I don't know how how he got the gig, but he had experience behind him. Make no mistake though, if he screws up? he's gone.

I agree that everyone has to start somewhere. Who was Richard Donner before Superman? He happened to direct, "The Omen" that rode on the coat tales of "The Exorcist". But, he had tons of experience directing live television.

Tim Burton was really wasn't anyone before "Batman". But he had two hit movies under his belt. The producers liked him more for his,''vision" than anything else.

But that's neither here nor there.

ASM2? I blame Sony and Webb. I think they're both dummies. It's the same reason I blame WB for sticking with Zack Snyder. If your big noisy spectacle isn't enough to put asses in seats, then maybe you're not the right choice, and maybe it's time for a change.

But they're not doing that. Like every dummy corporation, they can't admit when they're wrong. That's the problem.


In all honesty, when I read that Sam Raimi was "forced" into putting Venom in SM3, I lost a lot of respect for him. All I thought was, "Did he NOT make enough money off the first to films to be able to say,' I'm not doing this'". I mean, how much "**** you "money is enough in this world?

Because come the wet ass hour nobody is going to remember that it was Sony or Avi Arad that made him compromise his decisions, they're just going to remember that Sam Raimi made a really ****** 3rd Spider-Man movie.

And I'm sorry, but Marc Webb didn't prove anything. He did two Spider-man movies and neither one was a success. This sequel is going to make less than the first,( that didn't set the world on fire), and not by a few million either, but almost 200 million. You think he did an amazing job, but in the eyes of his peers, the press, and (alot of) fans etc. he didn't.

Maybe if they would have gotten someone who said. "Hey, I've been a Spidey fan my whole life!", instead of, "I've never read a comic in my life!" things might have been different.

Who knows?

 

[Biojex]

What an article.

P.S. DiFabio was right, read on:


It's easy to look at the $630 million earned globally by The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and assume it's doing pretty well. I mean, that's a lot of money. It's hard to deny that six hundred million dollars is an awful lot of money, and they still have some money left to make. The film will probably end up slightly north of $700 million global, with a domestic take right around $200 million. It's not impossible that the film makes less than $200 million domestic, but I imagine Sony will do what Warner Bros did with Superman Returns back in the day and basically will it over that line by keeping it in theaters forever. Maybe they'll do what Paramount does and rerelease the film with added footage (enough was cut from the movie) or a tease or something to eke out the remaining dollars needed to hit that arbitrary line.


Here's the reality: anything under $200 million domestic is embarrassing, and even slightly over $200 million is kind of a black eye. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues the steady, steady decline in domestic box office for the Spider-Man series, with none of the films ever coming close to the 2002 orginal's enormous box office. That was a movie that set records, that helped change the definitions of blockbuster business, and set a bar that seems impossible for the franchise to clear. Here's how they've all done, domestic:


Spider-Man $403.7m


Spider-Man 2 $373.5m


Spider-Man 3 $336.5m


The Amazing Spider-Man $262m


The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (to date) $172m


It's almost guaranteed that ASM2 will come in fifty to sixty million bucks lower than the reboot, which was already seventy million bucks off the last film - despite being in 3D and despite promising a change from that disliked entry. If this arc holds up we're looking at an Amazing Spider-Man 3 that earns maybe $150 million, which is absolutely terrible.


The global box office is harder to track across all five films; the global marketplace has exploded in the 12 years since the first movie was released. What we can do is see that the reboot made $752 million globally, and that Sony was feeling so confident in this new film that they in-house projected it to reach one billion dollars, that new global magic supernumber. I remember when a movie making $100 million domestic was a big deal - now that's an opening weekend! One billion bucks is where it is when it comes to these mega-franchises.


The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will not make one billion dollars.


I don't like writing about box office for a few reasons. One is that I hate boiling all this art down to some horrible commerce ********. But let's be real - these blockbuster movies are commerce into which, hopefully, some art is smuggled. That's why I tend to get really excited about a movie like Godzilla that is just wonderfully made, because it would have been easy to just churn it out and count the money. But the other reason I don't like writing about box office is that nobody really understands it. Box office is way more complicated than it looks, and there's a cabal of number wizards deep inside the studio basement who are chanting around an eldritch dollar sign and they're the only guys who really see the whole picture.


Even figuring out what a movie needs to make to be successful is hard; there are theater splits and marketing partners and prints and advertising costs and ancillary revenue streams - there's a lot of stuff that happens that we don't know about, a lot of numbers that get juggled to keep it all obscure from people whose contracts include a piece of the profit. What we can go by - and what counts for more than you think - is the perception.


That story I linked, about Sony wanting to make a billion bucks on The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that's a weird story because everybody wants to make a billion bucks. Either Sony leaked that to show their confidence in the film or someone else leaked it to make them look bad because it was becoming apparent from tracking that they weren't going to hit that number. The important thing to know is that Sony wanted to make a billion dollars with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, everybody heard that was what they wanted, and they're not going to get it. The other important thing is to look at the trend of box office and see how it is sketching out a graph that is headed down and you understand what Sony's executives are thinking right now:


"How do we fix this?"


This is supposed to be the part where I jump in and have my nerdy answers, but the reality is that I just don't know. I look at these numbers and I begin to think that maybe the story being told is that the public isn't that wildly interested in seeing Spider-Man on screen. His adventures, by their nature, have a bit of samey-ness to them. This doesn't bode well for Sony's plan to spin off a whole bunch of franchises from old Web-head.


They're not going to get rid of Marc Webb, and I don't think they should. They bought him out of his Fox contract so he could be their Spider-godfather (that's why there was an X-Men: Days of Future Past teaser in the credits of The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and he's a fine director. He just keeps having these godawful scripts.


They're not going to get rid of Andrew Garfield, that's for sure. He's the best part of this new series - well, except for Emma Stone, but they killed her off.


They're not going to reboot again because Jesus Christ, how horrible would that be?


I think they're going to back off the expanded universe idea. There's barely an appetite for Spider-Man, so what interest is there in his villains? I want only the best for Drew Goddard, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that Sinister Six, previously scheduled to shoot in January, sort of fades away. Sony needs to focus on The Amazing Spider-Man 3 first, and any good ideas that could have gone into a Sinister Six movie should get folded into the third film. In fact it seems absolutely bizarre to me that there was going to be a Sinister Six before The Amazing Spider-Man 3, considering what a ****** job The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did setting them up.


They're likely going to dip into the most popular villain well again. Will they repeat the sins of the Sam Raimi era and throw Venom into The Amazing Spider-Man 3? This is just visionless enough a franchise for me to believe it. Perhaps they'll go into the Clone Saga, which would allow them to bring Emma Stone back. It's already obvious that killing off Gwen Stacy at this point in the series was a mistake (not just in terms of severing the chemistry she has with Garfield but in terms of setting up the death of a Stacy as the cheap plot device they go to in each film. People are joking about which remaining Stacy family members die in the next entry).


What they won't do is find a good script. Every element is in place in the Amazing Spider-Man movies except for the scripts. These have been bad films from a basic structural place; they're using the best construction materials but are following ****** blue prints. I truly believe that if Webb and his team cracked a great script they could reverse the Spider-Man trend.


Or maybe that won't be enough. Maybe it really is simply Spider-Man's fault. Maybe swinging through the city five times was enough for audiences - they've seen it already.


My advice? Scale it back. Stop making these movies for $250 million each. Tell a street-level story that sheds a lot of light on Peter Parker, not his dad or Norman Osborn or anything like that. Have Spidey up against the Sin Eater or in the middle of a gang war (you can even keep Osborn in the picture by having OsCorp tech getting into gang hands). Tell a story about how hard it is for Peter Parker to juggle life as Pete and life as Spidey, something these new films has totally ignored. Bring back the old Parker luck, have Pete be broke, have Aunt May be sick, have J Jonah Jameson turn the city against him (use the death of Gwen as a catalyst). Definitely drop all the dad stuff - that's been wrapped up enough to ignore it from here on out.


Most importantly, restore to Spider-Man his true reason for being: the understanding that with great power comes great responsibility. That's why Spider-Man is a hero, not because he inspires people as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 wrongly gets it, but because he knows he has a responsibility to the world. His powers make Peter Parker not a superman but a servant of the people, a truly blue collar hero who is just there to help, not to clean up the mess made by his dad. Find that aspect of Spider-Man, the side of him that has moved readers for almost sixty years, and you can save this franchise.


Let's assume the Amazing Spider-Man franchise can be saved. What would you do? What's your big recommendation to Sony to bring this series back? Difficulty level: you can't tell them to sell Spidey back to Marvel.

This makes a lot good points on the structural weakness this franchise has.

Also I love whenever you post these, people think you're writing it ....er I mean...very well written, Jye

 

[jye4ever]

I wrote "what an article".

 

[The Phantom]

What an article.

P.S. DiFabio was right, read on:


It's easy to look at the $630 million earned globally by The Amazing Spider-Man 2 and assume it's doing pretty well. I mean, that's a lot of money. It's hard to deny that six hundred million dollars is an awful lot of money, and they still have some money left to make. The film will probably end up slightly north of $700 million global, with a domestic take right around $200 million. It's not impossible that the film makes less than $200 million domestic, but I imagine Sony will do what Warner Bros did with Superman Returns back in the day and basically will it over that line by keeping it in theaters forever. Maybe they'll do what Paramount does and rerelease the film with added footage (enough was cut from the movie) or a tease or something to eke out the remaining dollars needed to hit that arbitrary line.


Here's the reality: anything under $200 million domestic is embarrassing, and even slightly over $200 million is kind of a black eye. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 continues the steady, steady decline in domestic box office for the Spider-Man series, with none of the films ever coming close to the 2002 orginal's enormous box office. That was a movie that set records, that helped change the definitions of blockbuster business, and set a bar that seems impossible for the franchise to clear. Here's how they've all done, domestic:


Spider-Man $403.7m


Spider-Man 2 $373.5m


Spider-Man 3 $336.5m


The Amazing Spider-Man $262m


The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (to date) $172m


It's almost guaranteed that ASM2 will come in fifty to sixty million bucks lower than the reboot, which was already seventy million bucks off the last film - despite being in 3D and despite promising a change from that disliked entry. If this arc holds up we're looking at an Amazing Spider-Man 3 that earns maybe $150 million, which is absolutely terrible.


The global box office is harder to track across all five films; the global marketplace has exploded in the 12 years since the first movie was released. What we can do is see that the reboot made $752 million globally, and that Sony was feeling so confident in this new film that they in-house projected it to reach one billion dollars, that new global magic supernumber. I remember when a movie making $100 million domestic was a big deal - now that's an opening weekend! One billion bucks is where it is when it comes to these mega-franchises.


The Amazing Spider-Man 2 will not make one billion dollars.


I don't like writing about box office for a few reasons. One is that I hate boiling all this art down to some horrible commerce ********. But let's be real - these blockbuster movies are commerce into which, hopefully, some art is smuggled. That's why I tend to get really excited about a movie like Godzilla that is just wonderfully made, because it would have been easy to just churn it out and count the money. But the other reason I don't like writing about box office is that nobody really understands it. Box office is way more complicated than it looks, and there's a cabal of number wizards deep inside the studio basement who are chanting around an eldritch dollar sign and they're the only guys who really see the whole picture.


Even figuring out what a movie needs to make to be successful is hard; there are theater splits and marketing partners and prints and advertising costs and ancillary revenue streams - there's a lot of stuff that happens that we don't know about, a lot of numbers that get juggled to keep it all obscure from people whose contracts include a piece of the profit. What we can go by - and what counts for more than you think - is the perception.


That story I linked, about Sony wanting to make a billion bucks on The Amazing Spider-Man 2, that's a weird story because everybody wants to make a billion bucks. Either Sony leaked that to show their confidence in the film or someone else leaked it to make them look bad because it was becoming apparent from tracking that they weren't going to hit that number. The important thing to know is that Sony wanted to make a billion dollars with The Amazing Spider-Man 2, everybody heard that was what they wanted, and they're not going to get it. The other important thing is to look at the trend of box office and see how it is sketching out a graph that is headed down and you understand what Sony's executives are thinking right now:


"How do we fix this?"


This is supposed to be the part where I jump in and have my nerdy answers, but the reality is that I just don't know. I look at these numbers and I begin to think that maybe the story being told is that the public isn't that wildly interested in seeing Spider-Man on screen. His adventures, by their nature, have a bit of samey-ness to them. This doesn't bode well for Sony's plan to spin off a whole bunch of franchises from old Web-head.


They're not going to get rid of Marc Webb, and I don't think they should. They bought him out of his Fox contract so he could be their Spider-godfather (that's why there was an X-Men: Days of Future Past teaser in the credits of The Amazing Spider-Man 2) and he's a fine director. He just keeps having these godawful scripts.


They're not going to get rid of Andrew Garfield, that's for sure. He's the best part of this new series - well, except for Emma Stone, but they killed her off.


They're not going to reboot again because Jesus Christ, how horrible would that be?


I think they're going to back off the expanded universe idea. There's barely an appetite for Spider-Man, so what interest is there in his villains? I want only the best for Drew Goddard, but I wouldn't be surprised to find that Sinister Six, previously scheduled to shoot in January, sort of fades away. Sony needs to focus on The Amazing Spider-Man 3 first, and any good ideas that could have gone into a Sinister Six movie should get folded into the third film. In fact it seems absolutely bizarre to me that there was going to be a Sinister Six before The Amazing Spider-Man 3, considering what a ****** job The Amazing Spider-Man 2 did setting them up.


They're likely going to dip into the most popular villain well again. Will they repeat the sins of the Sam Raimi era and throw Venom into The Amazing Spider-Man 3? This is just visionless enough a franchise for me to believe it. Perhaps they'll go into the Clone Saga, which would allow them to bring Emma Stone back. It's already obvious that killing off Gwen Stacy at this point in the series was a mistake (not just in terms of severing the chemistry she has with Garfield but in terms of setting up the death of a Stacy as the cheap plot device they go to in each film. People are joking about which remaining Stacy family members die in the next entry).


What they won't do is find a good script. Every element is in place in the Amazing Spider-Man movies except for the scripts. These have been bad films from a basic structural place; they're using the best construction materials but are following ****** blue prints. I truly believe that if Webb and his team cracked a great script they could reverse the Spider-Man trend.


Or maybe that won't be enough. Maybe it really is simply Spider-Man's fault. Maybe swinging through the city five times was enough for audiences - they've seen it already.


My advice? Scale it back. Stop making these movies for $250 million each. Tell a street-level story that sheds a lot of light on Peter Parker, not his dad or Norman Osborn or anything like that. Have Spidey up against the Sin Eater or in the middle of a gang war (you can even keep Osborn in the picture by having OsCorp tech getting into gang hands). Tell a story about how hard it is for Peter Parker to juggle life as Pete and life as Spidey, something these new films has totally ignored. Bring back the old Parker luck, have Pete be broke, have Aunt May be sick, have J Jonah Jameson turn the city against him (use the death of Gwen as a catalyst). Definitely drop all the dad stuff - that's been wrapped up enough to ignore it from here on out.


Most importantly, restore to Spider-Man his true reason for being: the understanding that with great power comes great responsibility. That's why Spider-Man is a hero, not because he inspires people as The Amazing Spider-Man 2 wrongly gets it, but because he knows he has a responsibility to the world. His powers make Peter Parker not a superman but a servant of the people, a truly blue collar hero who is just there to help, not to clean up the mess made by his dad. Find that aspect of Spider-Man, the side of him that has moved readers for almost sixty years, and you can save this franchise.


Let's assume the Amazing Spider-Man franchise can be saved. What would you do? What's your big recommendation to Sony to bring this series back? Difficulty level: you can't tell them to sell Spidey back to Marvel.

Wow. That's this guy's solution? Stick with Webb and hope for the best?

I said in my 1st post that they should combine The Sinister Six with ASM3.

But that won't work either. How can they do that without spending even MORE money?

Whatever. I wish them all the luck.

 

[guy66657]

I think Spidey is cool when he exists in the Marvel Universe. He is fine in New Avengers and such. But his best stories are always when he's alone. And really, New Avengers is the only time where I've liked Spidey as part of the team. I would say, if we ever did get the right back, is to not make him an official part of the Avengers team until way way after the Avengers have had more history.

 

[The Amazing Spider-Man]

I think Spidey is cool when he exists in the Marvel Universe. He is fine in New Avengers and such. But his best stories are always when he's alone. And really, New Avengers is the only time where I've liked Spidey as part of the team. I would say, if we ever did get the right back, is to not make him an official part of the Avengers team until way way after the Avengers have had more history.

I think a great time to bring him in would be during a civil war storyline. I think they'll remove his secret identity reveal though. Not a good move for the movie-verse.

 

[Bardoon]

I wrote "what an article".

Thanks for finding it!

A post that long from you is definitely out of character so I knew you found it somewhere! Good find!

 

[Frank]

They should table the entire Sinister Six and just dedicate a movie to Kraven.

 

[Uncanny Web-Slinger]

The Raimi films? I'm like everyone else. I liked the first one (but didn't like Goblin's suit), and loved the 2nd one. I thought SM3 sucked. Just like everyone else.

Just so you know, I'm wasn't saying what I said because I'm some Raimi fanboy. As far as I'm concerned, SR had his chance and he whiffed when he didn't use the Lizard as the big bad in 3. As far as I was concerned, game over.

So am I a Webb head? Not a chance. And I say that because I don't think a filmmaker with one hit movie (a rom com no less) should be given the keys to the kingdom.

What exactly qualified him for this gig anyway? I can't figure it out. Maybe because it's a Japanese company they thought that because his name was Webb it was a good sign. What else? I can't think of anything. I didn't even like, "500 days of Summer". I thought it sucked.

But before anybody starts defending him, let me ask you this; do you know that he had to be talked into taking this job?

Yeah, let that sink in. HE HAD TO BE TALKED INTO TAKING ON SPIDER-MAN. Can you believe that? Like this dip**** was Orson Welles or something. Yes, talked in to it. I read an interview with him in New York magazine and he said the woman from Sony told him, "You can't turn down Spider-man".

Seriously? This was who you go with? A guy who had zero interest in this character but is doing them a favor. And why? Gee, maybe because if you direct a super hero movie, it's instant fame. That might be it.

Can anyone really say that they knew who he was after, "500 days of Summer"?, Honestly? Because that's all he really ever did. Well, unless you're someone who still watches music videos, you might have heard of him. And if you did know him from that, then you're the only one left.

Lame.

Can you imagine? Sam Raimi had to work his way up the trenches to get a shot at directing a movie of a character who he read growing up and loved, and this guy, who couldn't give less of a ****, is handed over the store. Unbelievable.

And if that wasn't bad enough, the director they had to talk into it, makes a movie that comes and goes in less than a month, and is considered a film that, "Got a lackluster response from film goers when it was released" Is given MORE money and a second shot.

To me, that's ********. In life, you don't get to fail UP. After ASM, MW should have been shown the door. But he wasn't, and Sony has to live with that choice. But guess what?

So do we.

Am I a fan of Marc Webb? No, I'm not. I'm not a fan of him, or the writers, or Avi Arad. You know why?

They don't give two ****s about Spider-Man.

But I do.

So anyone who wants to delude themselves into thinking that this film is, "breaking even", and Sony is going to go "full steam ahead" with their plans, think again. Because it's not happening. You may think that this movie is successful, but they know it's not.

They know only too well. If nothing else, believe that.

This is some Class A BS.

Webb does like Spider-Man. You act as if every director of every CBM except Webb is a huge fan of the source material, nine times out of ten they are movie-makers who sign on to make a movie and that's it.

The problem with the franchise is it needs to slow things down and not get into this Cinematic Universe fad, hire better writers and just focus on telling good stories

I think Spidey is cool when he exists in the Marvel Universe. He is fine in New Avengers and such. But his best stories are always when he's alone. And really, New Avengers is the only time where I've liked Spidey as part of the team. I would say, if we ever did get the right back, is to not make him an official part of the Avengers team until way way after the Avengers have had more history.

They'd still face the same problem as Sony, audiences aren't responding to Spidey as much anymore.

 

[Silrian]

The problem with the franchise is it needs to slow things down and not get into this Cinematic Universe fad, hire better writers and just focus on telling good stories

Exactly, and that is exactly what Sony will prevent. Spider-man is a massive victim of the cross-feature gimmick today (and although I love it, it is a gimmick, that is to say, everyone but Marvel Studios is making it into a gimmick).

Then again, I'm not sure who came up with the parent origin thing, but that genuinely ruins a LOT in this franchise. It ruine dASM1 because it claimed to be present when it wasn't, and it ruined ASM2 because it got forcibly handled after criticism on ASM1.

It's unbelievable to me that they didn't do what WB does with Batman now: just introduce him as someone who's been busy for a while. We've had the original trilogy so close to the reboot (just like with Batman) and yet they still did a full origin retelling, that was a massive mistake. Now they're stuck with all the negatives of a reboot, and none of the positives, and that blame lies with the entire crew, Webb, Arad and Sony. They handled this reboot entirely the wrong way. Everybody knows spider-man, they didn't need to setup ****. They could just swing him into action and boom stories can get kicked off.

Instead, they're not only wasting time on retelling the origin, they're EXPANDING it, which is even more time wasted. It wasted half of ASM1, and that half was now time they came up short on in this film to have a proper setup for "sequelised" content.

They ****ed up from a reboot point of view, no matter how much you might enjoy these films. Tactically speaking, they completely missed the mark. And now ASM2 has so MANY tie-ins that they've now tied themselves to their own sinking ship.

ASM3, if it gets made, could be the best of all three films still,. but they've set themselves in a very embarrassing position imo, because they had a brilliant crew of filmmakers and they focussed half their attention on the wrong thing. The Peter/Gwen (and now Harry) dynamic and spider-man busy on his own, quipping and swinging around, is the only quality in these films and considering the vast opportunities they had that is a massive fail.

 

[Niltusk]

Yep, they should have started the series as a voice over flashback from Garfield, gave his origin a couple minutes and then moved on. The whole ma and pa Parker cap was just that... crap, they tried to hard to distance themselves from their past trilogy and they should have just concentrated on better story between Spider and the villains. And of course, back to beating the horse, but maybe a little JJJ introduced instead of all that extra fluff crap. JJJ could have had a field day blaming the death of Captain Stacy on Spidey if they wanted to add some turmoil. I also agree with everyone who's saying it all needs scaled back. From hulk lizard to super electro. Just write decent villains that challenge Spidey and his struggle to overcome them. Joker disn't have to develop eye lasers or hulk out like Mr Hyde in TDK to be interesting, he just had to be developed well and made interesting. Let's face it, Spidey needs one great villain, not half a dozen mediocre ones. The thing is will it even make sense to scale back when this franchise has been so 'monty haul' with its villains?

 

[ironwez20]

They should table the entire Sinister Six and just dedicate a movie to Kraven.

Have you played the ASM2 game. I read some of the story. Its sort of like batman begins. Spiderman loses his uncle and Kraven comes in and says that spiderman has to be ruthless to catch him. He even considers him a pupil. He sort of takes spidey under his wing. Its actually kinda freaking cool and would of made for a great first movie imo.

 

[jye4ever]

Thanks for finding it!

A post that long from you is definitely out of character so I knew you found it somewhere! Good find!

That's what I love about this forum, people always sharing announcements, photos, articles, naked pics of their wives and trailers.