So they are rebooting Spider-Man.  I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am.  As a lifelong Spidey fan, I’ve followed the Wall Crawler’s adventures from the early days of Lee, Ditko and Romita to the Michelinie, McFarlane and Larsen era, all the way up to Straczynski and Romita Jr. run.  I’ve always loved Spidey, his relationship to New York, and most of all his real-world problems.  When Marvel and Sony decided to launch the character onto the big screen at the beginning of the last decade I was more than a little nervous.  Of course, once I saw it, like many other Spidey fans, I was blown away.  It wasn’t a perfect film, but it was damn good.  The second movie was a huge improvement, with pitch perfect dialogue, set pieces and special effects.  By the time I lined up to see the third one I was pretty confident that, though it seemed a bit uneven in the trailers, Raimi and company would deliver.  Boy was I wrong.  Spider-Man 3 was pure rubbish; a slap in the face to hardcore fans everywhere.  Mind you, on its own it’s not a terrible movie, it just really sucks when compared to what came before.  Maybe if I had never seen 1 or 2 the idea of Peter Parker wearing eyeliner and dancing in the streets would seem more palatable… Okay, maybe not.

Raimi promised to shake things up for the fourth installment of the franchise, expressing regret about a lot of what actually made it up on screen for part 3.  After witnessing a ridiculously fun return to form with 'Drag Me to Hell', I had no reason to doubt him.  Then came the news last week that Raimi and Maguire were out, and a Reboot was looming.  Look, reboots have been quite the rage in Hollywood for the last decade or so, and as a fan who loves 'Batman Begins', 'Casino Royale' and 'Star Trek' (2009), the idea of shaking things up is not what concerns me.  What bothers the crap out of me is the fact that the script that Sony is moving forward with involves Peter Parker going back to high school.  Back… to… high school.  Really?  Spider-Man debuted in 1962, and has appeared in numerous stories in multiple titles every month since, and the best these guys can come up with as far as a story base is to start him over in high-school?  Thanks Sony, you’ve proven once again that you don’t really give a damn about what true fans want because let’s face it, an making extra $200 million worldwide is worth alienating the folks who made the character so popular to begin with. 

Matt Goldberg at Collider.com said it best when he lamented, “This means that Sony just pushed up the timetable on setting up a crappy precedent where they don’t have to use over forty years of material from the comics, but can just keep redoing the series to suit the demographic with the most purchasing power at the time.  That’s why when Sony means Peter Parker is going back to high-school, it means they’re skewing towards the Twilight crowd because they know the fanboys will nut up, take it, and then complain about it after they’ve already paid x-amount of dollars to see it…”  Read the full article here.

Right now, I couldn’t care less about the fact that it’s written by the same guy who penned the brilliant 'Zodiac', or that all in all, this movie might actually correct some of the mistakes of the Raimi era.  All I can focus on is the fact that I have to sit through another hour and fifteen minutes of Spider-Man’s origin, one that everyone on the planet already freaking knows.  Movie making is a business, and so is comic book publishing, but I may have to walk away from the movie franchise like I did from the Amazing Spider-Man comic series when Marvel decided that instead of charging me $3 a month for one decent story they could charge me $9 for three sub-par ones.  Bravo Marvel. Bravo Sony.  Thanks for all the wonderful memories.  Except for that whole Peter Parker dancing thing.