With ‘Captain America: Civil War’ now open in the UK many will see the latest incarnation of Spiderman with Tom Holland now in the role and he really is rather good and perhaps this version (mk 3.0) will see the reinvigoration of this particular super hero franchise which Sony have put on hold having rented out the character to Marvel films.
Tobey Maguire as Spiderman had been a film long in preparation with even James Cameron interested at one point before Sam Raimi took over and made 3 massively successful films though ever more expensively budgeted films costing $139m, $200m and finally a whopping $258m respectively. In fairness though all made big, BIG money and it was rumoured that Sony were pushing for a fourth film setting a release date before Raimi was really ready and in the end he jumped ship putting the franchise on a temporary hiatus.
The series was essentially rebooted but with arguably what was an origin story despite there having been one only a few years before. None the less director Marc Webb was bought onboard due to his directorial debut ,‘500 Days of Summer’, which had been a youth orientated love story/comedy and it was felt he was the right man to focus on the Peter Parker love story element of Spiderman. Summer 2012 saw the franchise reboot with Andrew Garfield and Emma Stone in the lead roles with the technology allowing him to swoop through the cityscapes even more convincingly. At a cost of $230m it was yet another expensive film in the franchise but was well received and made $757m worldwide and so another film was prepped but with a slightly smaller budget. But like Raimi’s third film this too was to feature a welter of maybe too many villains but was intended to lay the foundation for a bigger universe a la Marvel’s own superhero franchise and hinted at a supervillain Sinister Six film. Unfortunately on release it was far from a critical success though still a box office hit making $708m and it was the box office that was most telling as by now after five films it could be seen in the US market that each film was making less than the last with the original film having made more than twice than ‘The Amazing Spiderman 2’ in 2014.
Sony had made plans for more Spidey films as well as Sinister Six and Venom films but these were ultimately abandoned and when North Korea launched a huge cyber attack on the company due to the release of Seth Rogan’ s highly irreverent, ‘The Interview’ a film which was clearly mocking the country’s leader all manner of emails came out into the open which included the script for ‘Spectre’, the CEO’s disparaging and embarrassing remarks about Angelina Jolie, confidential meetings about the possible return of Sam Raimi to the franchise and business talks with Marvel, who had now been bought by Disney, to rent out Spiderman to them for ‘Captain America : Civil War’. Talks did break down it appears at one point but were quickly back on track again.
Which brings us to today with Civil War getting extremely good advance reviews (check our own review) it seems that the time is now right for another Spiderman with Holland as the web slinger to appear in the pointedly titled, ‘Spiderman:Homecoming’ set for a July 2017 release and to feature Iron Man who Marvel /Disney own the rights too and presumably are renting out to Sony. Sony have taken another gamble with the director Jon Watts whose most notable film to date is a horror flick called ‘Clown’.
‘Spiderman:Homecoming’ goes into production next year with a US release date of July 7th 2017 and a UK release date 28th July 2017.
