If The Amazing Spider-Man is a hit, then the floodgates will open. If Sony gets away with kicking Sam Raimi off the franchise that made it billions of dollars purely due to artistic disagreements (after they forced Raimi to include Venom in Spider-Man 3), then it will be open season on reboots and the end to any kind of artistic freedom on these genre franchises. Every remotely successful property in the last three decades will be vulnerable. We've already seen this trend in horror films, where pretty much every major 1970s and 1980s horror classic has been remade. But again, in that case we are talking about remakes of 25-35-year old films intended to supplement, not replace, the original versions. What we have here is a studio arbitrarily throwing out an ongoing franchise in order to save money and have more creative control. If this works, every franchise will be 'do a trilogy and reboot'. And more importantly, if rebooting is successful, we will see the same dozen or so franchises being rebooted over and over again. We'll see Warner Bros. rebooting every major property in their arsenal (Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Batman, Superman, Lethal Weapon, The Matrix, Dirty Harry, etc) every ten years. We'll see Fox redoing their Marvel properties (Daredevil, Fantastic Four, X-Men) over and over again all to keep the franchise rights from transferring to Disney. We will see endless Bourne films with countless different brainwashed Treadstone agents. We'll see new variations on Indiana Jones (starring, I dunno, Taylor Lautner), Die Hard (starring... umm... Jason Statham?), the Jack Ryan series (apparently now starring Chris Pine), Ghostbusters (starring Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, and Paul Rudd), and any other remotely popular genre film you can think of from the last ten to thirty years. And when the newest variation of said franchise is tapped out, they'll just start up all over again.
This isn't about Hollywood not being original. Heck, many of the best films of modern times were based on novels, and several were based on comic books (although only a couple were based on television shows while none were based on video games). This is about the very real threat whereby the big studios basically recycle their biggest cash cows over and over again. There have already been hints of this, with a remake of Total Recall in production and remakes/reboots of The Crow, Lethal Weapon, and The Bodyguard in pre-production. More importantly, the threat of merely being kicked off the property and watching as the studio just reboots the thing will be fatal to filmmakers who want to exhibit any kind of creative control over these films. But if The Amazing Spider-Man genuinely flops, it may be the last/best chance to stop this unrelenting drive of various studio heads to merely reboot the hit franchises of the previous generation. Our kids (to say nothing of ourselves) deserve a better class of big-budget genre picture than mere retreads of the stuff we liked or our parents like.
As I said, I like everyone involved with The Amazing Spider-Man. I rather adore the two apparent main sources of inspiration, Brian Michael Bendis' Ultimate Spider-Man and Greg Weisman's Spectacular Spider-Man cartoon. But the success of this Spider-Man 2.0 will only bring out the copy cats that much faster. Unless we want to see a big budget release schedule filled with the same dozen franchise recycled over and over again, Spidey may have to make the ultimate sacrifice. Because with great power comes... you get the idea.
Scott Mendelson
