More details revealed for new Spider-Man. Less interested am I.

The last 24 hours has seen even more details regarding the new Spider-Man reboot than we have even had over the last week or so. While Marc Webb, director of the fantastic (500) Days Of Summer has been confirmed as director, surprising exactly no-one, it has been revealed that the budget of the film will be less than previously anticipated and that rather than referring to the classic Spider-Man stories which Sam Raimi used as inspiration, the film is going to take cues from a rather more modern interpretation.

It seems that Sony have set the film’s budget at a rather meagre $80 million, the lowest reported budget for a blockbuster in… well ages. Tentpole films have seen budgets getting more and more ridiculous over the last few years with even the awful looking (never mind anything else) X-Men Origins: Wolverine costing $150 million. Now admittedly the cost of getting the talent in is going to be far less, Marc Webb won’t have cost much and the youthful spin being put on the film gives the perfect excuse to get a little known teen star and pay them relative peanuts, but I still can’t help but be worried about this.

Do not get me wrong, if this sees the start of Hollywood starting to realise that $200 million is not needed to make Transformers 2 and its ilk then I could not be happier. However, the sense that Sony are trying to cheap this one out is very much in the air and this really could hit the film where it hurts, in the action department which lets face it, is damn important for a summer film (especially when it will be released in the same summer as The Avengers).

Also confirmed is that the film is going to be drawing on the mythology of one of the latest iterations of Spider-Man, Ultimate Spider-Man, which apparently very much positions the love-life of Peter Parker as virtually the most important element of the film. This is the kind of stuff which I can see Marc Webb knocking out of the park, the man seems to be able to conjure romance and heartbreak on screen in his sleep, but the high-key emotion of many teen orientated films would also seem to be influencing this (which is otherwise called The Twilight Factor) and I worry that this could alienate an awful lot of the film’s potential audience. I think Spider-Man 2 got the balance absolutely dead on between the melodrama and the action but Sam Raimi had both relative creative freedom and a big budget to pull this off. A tween-aimed Spidey is not hard to imagine, that audience making itself very much felt over the last few years, but what that will not do is make a film for the ages which the 2nd Raimi film certainly is. A quick-buck will be great for the studio, but if the film is a shit-sandwich what good will that do for the franchise in the future?

Sony obviously have faith, giving Webb options for a trilogy of films and with a production budget like this, the film will have to be an unmitigated disaster from the word go to not turn a profit but Sony I ask you: Is this good for the soul? Aside from Webb and writer James Vanderbilt’s involvement, admittedly 2 crucial aspects, this is not looking good.

Ian Loring.