After years of legal wrangling, a Marvel bankruptcy and an abandoned James Cameron treatment, Sony finally gets a movie off the ground with Tobey Maguire starring and Sam Raimi directing. The three films generated $2.5 billion in total box office, second only to the Batman franchise.
If you still shudder at the mere thought of the much-derided Spider-Man 3 (emo Peter Parker, anyone?), the film’s director is right there with you.
Sam Raimi spoke to the Nerdist podcast Monday about the challenges he faced in directing Sony’s Spider-Man trilogy, particularly 2007’s third installment.
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“Each and every one of those Spider-Man movies were pretty damn challenging,” Raimi said of the Tobey Maguire-fronted films.
“I messed up plenty with the third Spider-Man, so people hated me for years — they still hate me for it,” he continued, revealing that he gets guff from passersby on the street about the film. “It’s a movie that just didn’t work very well.”
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Raimi now feels it was “wrong” of him to make the trilogy’s final film because he “didn’t really believe in all the characters.”
As for where things went wrong, he said he should have kept the film’s focus on the relationships between the characters. “[Topping the previous two films] went into the thinking of a lot of people that worked on Spider-Man 3, and it was not good for us,” Raimi said.
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Spider-Man 3 holds a 63 percent approval rating on review aggregate site Rotten Tomatoes, along with a 59 on Metacritic. It grossed $890 million worldwide, more than either of its two predecessors in the franchise.
The beloved Marvel character was recently the focus of emails leaked in the Sony cyberattack, with Sony and Marvel-owner Disney discussing the possibility of Spider-Man appearing in 2016’s Captain America: Civil War. Sony has pushed its next Amazing Spider-Man film back from 2016 to 2018 after this summer’s Amazing Spider-Man 2 underperformed at the box office.
A Spider-Man 3 clip can be seen below and provides a sense of why many viewers took umbrage with the film.
Email: Ryan.Gajewski@pgmedia.org
Twitter: @_RyanGajewski
