MARKETPLACE COMIC-BOOK FRANCHISES AND REBOOTS
The Amazing Spider-Man Suited and rebooted
How do you go about updating a classic franchise? Ian Sandwell looks at the latest reboot set to hit our screens this summer, Sony’s The Amazing Spider-Man
W
ith $2.5bn caught in the web of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man tril- ogy at the worldwide box
office, it is little surprise that when a fourth Raimi instalment was not on the cards, Sony looked at other ways to con- tinue the franchise. “The idea was to conclude what we
had done with Sam, and Sam was the first to say, ‘I’ve told my story and I’m ready to move on,’” says Matt Tolmach, the former president of Sony who over- saw the original trilogy, before setting up his own production company in Novem- ber 2010, based out of Columbia Pictures. “We were faced with, ‘What do we do?’” The solution? A reboot in the form of
The Amazing Spider-Man. “It is designed to start a new story” says Avi Arad, former CEO of Marvel Studios, who also worked on the original trilogy before setting up Arad Productions. “You always set out to do the best you can but
■ 54 Screen International June-July 2012
‘We knew we had enough of a story that if it’s done
right, it’s fresh’ Avi Arad, producer
here we knew we had enough of a story that if it’s done right, it’s fresh.” To craft that take on Spider-Man, pro-
ducers Arad, Tolmach and Sony’s Laura Ziskin — who worked on the project until her death in 2011 — turned to (500) Days Of Summer director Marc Webb, who immediately set a different “table” for his Spider-Man to play out on. “[Webb] was really vocal right away
about telling a story that was both about the essence of Peter Parker, but that lived in this world — a more grounded, very contemporary world with gravity,” says Tolmach. If anything about rebooting the Spi-
der-Man franchise daunted Tolmach, it was finding the new Peter Parker. For that, the team turned to UK actor Andrew Garfi eld — who had gained recognition for his performances in Boy A and the Red Riding trilogy. “He had incredible power on the one hand as an actor and
incredible vulnerability,” says Tolmach of Garfi eld, who has gone on to become one of the hottest young actors in Hollywood as a result of The Social Network. His co-star Emma Stone — who will
play Gwen Stacy, Parker’s first love in the comics who had a tiny part in Spider- Man 3 — has also gone on to box-offi ce success and critical acclaim since being cast in the role, starring in last year’s US smash The Help. “Since we started, the world has
found them,” Tolmach notes. “So now we have Spider-Man with two of the hot- test young actors in the business and, more importantly, the best.” Gwen Stacy’s inclusion in The Amaz-
ing Spider-Man, along with its more realistic edge, lends the reboot a poten- tial parallel with other recent successful reboots. Both Batman Begins ($372.7m worldwide) and James Bond fi lm Casino Royale ($594.2m worldwide) took their
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