Expect lots of info in the coming weeks that shows my initial fears about the new franchise were well founded. Welcome to Smallville, Spider-Man style.
I wrote that about an hour or so ago, about the hiring of Marc Webb to direct the rebooted Spider-Man franchise. Well, I was wrong – it didn’t take weeks for the info, it took hours. I couldn’t run this stuff because it quite simply wasn’t my info to run, but all of what I have been hearing this past week has come true, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
– The new film will have an 80 million dollar budget, essentially guaranteeing it will be light on action and superheroics.
– The story will come from the Ultimate Spider-Man comics, so expect lots of Yiddish. Well, maybe not, but expect lots of teen soap nonsense that Peter Parker outgrew within two years of the classic Amazing Spider-Man comics (he graduated high school in #28. Peter Parker juggling college, a job, Aunt May, his love life and Spider-Man is infinitely more interesting than Peter pretending to be a nerd and getting swirlies from Flash Thompson). As the Hollywood Reporter put it: ‘villain-fighting took a back seat to the high school angst [in USM].
– The cast will be all unknowns, so enough with the Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It was never going to happen.
– The story will focus ‘on a high school kid who is dealing with the knowledge that his uncle died even though the teen had the power to stop it.’ So expect not just mopey emo nonsense, but a retelling of the origin story.
Not mentioned in the story: Gwen Stacey and Mary Jane are both in the film at this point. Flash Thompson also plays a major role, in a love quadrangle sort of way. Expect this to play out exactly like a TV show – my Smallville comparison was on purpose – that continues on and on with minimal advancement. I expect Peter to remain in high school for at least the first three films, if not forever (remember – the actors will be signed to six to nine picture deals). It’s possible that villains will be rejiggered to be more high school in age, as well, although that’s a guess.
If you have the Jamie Vanderbilt script, please feel free to pass it on to me at devin at chud.com. I’m a huge fan of Spider-Man the character and I’m hoping that reading what Vanderbilt has written will help quash the many concerns that grow with each new announcement about this reboot.