Sequels and remakes: Comic book movies

When I heard they were making a new Spiderman, restarting the series with new actors, and a new director, my first thoughts were not “joy!” but, “Man, they are really running out of ideas.” And when I say “they,” I mean Hollywood in general. In the amount of movies that have come out in the past years, there has been a steady increase in sequels of movies that worked or didn’t work, remakes, reboots, and movie-do-overs.

Spiderman is the most recent idea of, “hey, this idea can still make us money.” This happens a lot. Or, “let’s just restart or change the actors, maybe that will fix mistakes made before.” I do not particularly like the first few Spiderman movies, but combined, they made almost 3 billion dollars world wide. Maybe it’s just that I do not like Sam Raimi’s directing style, or Toby Maguire, or, Kirsten Dunst. Even the last iteration, Spiderman 3, was meet with terrible reviews from critics and fans. Yet it grossed 900 million dollars. (boxofficemojo.com) So who cares if it’s really bad, and they ruin the character for fans, “they” are going to make tons of money.

I am not saying that I won’t go see The new movie, “The Amazing Spiderman”, but I feel like it’s just a little to soon. I mean, the idea is still fresh in everyone minds. They will have to be very careful to not be redundant and bore the audience, with a retelling of his “origin” story. Having said that, I will probably go see the new film, but if it sucks I am done. Saying this now, as a comic book movie fan, I will never see a Spiderman film again, if they ruin this for me. I just can’t handle another disappointment.
Marvel studios has tried this before, back in 2008 with The Incredible Hulk. They attempted series reboot, from the 2003 utter disappointment. It was not exactly a series reset, as it did not retell the origin story. They simply replaced all the actors and added a new director, and we got a far better film than 2003’s Hulk. God, Ang Lee, what were you thinking? Giant Hulk dogs?

The best series reboot by far is the Batman series. It’s fantastic. The the reboot shows you how bad the original Batman films really were, and stepped up comic book movies to another level. The difference between Batman & Robin and Batman Begins was 8 years, and since Batman was watch-able, since Batman returns, it’s been 13 years. So at that point we were happy to see a restart. But after The Dark knight Rises, where will we go from here? I think it will be Zach Snyder’s Man of Steel, another comic book reboot. It seems they won’t stop rehashing these characters. As a comic book fan, I just hope these people show some respect to the characters that I know so well.

I guess it’s going to be never ending, as long as people will go see these movies. I mean they make a crap movie and how does it effect “them” well they are out a bunch of money, but we, the comic book fans are they ones that are hurt. You can’t put a price on a fan’s love of an Iconic character. Even if they are crap, they will keep trying over and over, until they have sucked the ideas dry and no one cares about them anymore.There I’ll be, reading comics, content.