How To Kill A Superhero Franchise In 20 Easy Steps: Spider-Man Edition

I think you’re being too hard on Spider-Man 3. It wasn’t great, and certainly not a worthy follow-up to Spider-Man 2, but it’s not like it was Batman & Robin.

Let’s just agree to disagree

Fair enough, although let me just throw some tomatometer ratings in there:

Batman & Robin: 12%
Spider-Man 3: 62%

Not to mention Richard Corliss’ Time review:

http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1617207-2,00.html

“I liked it. To place a sensitive story in a male-epic genre — to dramatize feelings of angst and personal betrayal worthy of an Ingmar Bergman film, and then to dress them up in gaudy comic-book colors — is to pull off a smartly subversive drag show.”

oh darn, so we don’t get to see the Vulture? an old guy flying around in green armor . . . wait, didn’t we already see that in the first movie? maybe after the dismal 3rd movie he wanted to get back to basics.

The flamboyant over dramatic dance scene alone in spiderman 3 makes that movie worse than batman and robin hands. hands down.

Yeah, everybody makes fun of the Emo Peter scene and the dance scene in Spider-Man 3. But you should really watch Spider-Mans 1 and 2 again. They each have super-campy sequences like that in them; maybe not *quite* to that level, but tonally it wasn’t too big a shift. People just have selective memory.

I loved dancing Peter! That was the only part I liked.

Let’s see it again:

I agree that dickhead Peter Parker was by far the best part of Spidey 3. After the first two excellent installments of the franchise, the third movie really let me down. Harry turning babyface just ruined the movie for me. But it was still nowhere NEAR the debacle that Batman and Robin was. Bane as a monosyllabic retarded flunky? Batman as a graying guy that smiles all the time? Bruce Wayne engaged for nol apparent reason? How about cyber-Alfred? Uma Thurman and the cameo by Bob Kane’s widow were the only redeeming things in that movie. Shumacher and Clooney are still apologizing for killing that franchise dead.

And I freaking howled with laughter when they buried Shumacher in the Batman cartoon.

The real problem, at least for most, with Batman & Robin was that it explicitly made what was previously a straight male adolescent fantasy into a gay male adolescent fantasy. (Batman Forever did that, too, but few seemed to notice.) Or maybe Schumacher was trying to say the two fantasies aren’t that different from each other.

I think that’s what the cartoon was getting at but it says something about the times we live in that I can’t tell whether that’s homophobic or not.

But anyway, from my perspective, both fantasies were absurd and I’ve always preferred the TV shows. At least the camp of Batman & Robin poked some tiny holes into the dour self-seriousness of the franchise.

Oh, and then came the Dark Knight to do it all over again. Sigh.

I never really really saw the cartoon reference as homophobic at all. It was just the cartoon franchise making sure that people knew who they were talking about. There was a photo circulating around this time that showed Joel Shumacher in a pink boa. This particular episode was all about the different interpretations of Batman through the ages, from the cartoony, “giant-prop” era of Sprang and Robinson to the gim and gritty version of Frank Miller. In this context, the cartoon, which itself is part of this timeline, was saying that Shumacher’s version was a giant step backwards in believability and dram from the Burton verion from which the cartoon sprung as a starting point.

I enjoyed Batman Forever, as it was intentional comedy with some good interplay between Two_Face/ Riddler and Alfred/Robin. Val Kilmer was just a little overly dramatic, but still a lot of fun. Batman and Robin was just bad fimmaking, with 87 characters all competing for face time in the movie with no character development or motivation and attempts at humor that fell flat.

The big difference betwwen the Burton and Schumacher versions was that Gotham City looked like a dark fantasy, but still real, under Burton; under Shumacher, I could never suspend belief that they were on a soundstage for even a second. The new franchise isn’t trying for camp or self-parody, it’s trying to be as realistic as possible. Mystery Men was a much more entertaining superhero movie that was also aiming for over the top laughs.