So there’s your new Spider-Man, Tom Holland. Color me unimpressed. I have nothing against him and I’m sure he’ll do fine, but I’m really not on board with yet another new Spider-Man. This will be the second time they’ve restarted things, just four years after the previous restart. No one was really asking for the previous one, we just wanted a better movie than we got with Spider-Man 3. Re-casting the main role and continuing would have been fine. But they went through with it and we got Amazing Spider-Man. I skipped it at the theater because I flat out wasn’t ready for a restart. I did go see Amazing Spider-Man 2 last year and thought it was really good. But there was a vocal contingent of fans that hated it and they carried the day, so here we are. But I’m not feeling it.
I really wanted them to do the planned ASM 3 movie where Spidey would face some form of the Sinister Six, and then keep using Garfield as Spidey in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. I maintain that the Garfield series was killed by fanboys wanting Marvel to get the movie rights back and trashing anything that got in the way of that happening. I also think that had Marvel Studios made the exact same movie those same fanboys would have been fine with it. There were a lot of disingenuous pieces last year calling it a failure and flop even though it had a final gross of $709 million worldwide, eighth overall and not far off from Winter Soldier’s $714.8 million. And yet Winter Soldier was a smash but ASM 2 was a flop. And if you challenged that assertion with numbers you were hit with a response about how much it cost to make or Sony’s overall woes. And then the Sony hack laid everything bare and the Garfield Spider-Man series was doomed.
But anyhow, what’s done is done. We have a new Spider-Man and hopefully things will go well with it. I don’t root for failure even if I’m not feeling the move. I just wish they hadn’t pulled the plug so quickly.