Categories: Entertainment

Spiderman 3 is opening May 4th, and the hype is so overwhelming you can almost taste it. Well actually you can taste it, thanks to the masive merchandising blitz surrounding the movie. I’d try to name a few the Spidey themed products, but that would need a post by itself. You have cable. You know what I’m talking about. Nearly everything imaginable has been “spidified.” I’m surprised the game hasn’t come out yet, but they’ll probably want to package the game and the movie, as comic book movies do a lot nowadays. Sony built up the hype rather cleverly. Ever since news of the movie’s production came out, they’ve been giving us little bits of information, constantly teasing us like we were hungry dogs with their black, slime covered steak. And we took the bait. We speculated about which villains would be in the movie, who would play who, what would the plot be like. All the while blogging, making YouTube videos, IMing, chatting with our friends, unknowingly powering the hype. My friends and I were chatting about it the other day (same thing) and some of them said that they weren’t gonna watch it as Jake Gyllenhaal (of Brokeback Mountain fame) was going to play Spidey. The rest of us had to correct them. I think that’s quite immature. They’re called actors for a reason, and just because they play one role that might not agree with you doesn’t mean that should have any impact on any of their other roles.

The reason I think the Spiderman movie franchise has become so successful, apart from Kirsten Dunst’s wet bosom, is the fact that he’s a superhero that’s just like us, which was the draw of the comic as well. He gets bullied, tries to get the attention of the girl next door, goes through money problems, etc. It also us that there are consequences for a superhero’s actions, shattering the illusion that a superhero’s life is just about colorful tights, public adoration and saving the girl. That why Spidey 3’s box office haul should overshadow that of those giant robots and that teen wizard. Makes you wonder why Toby Maguire would want to leave such a lucrative franchise. Guess he doesn’t want to be typecast as the webslinger. Most movies overhyped like this collapse under the weight of their own hype, ending up like a black hole (for the movie studio’s pockets anyway). I don’t think that this will be the case with Spiderman 3. The supervillain trifecta is the biggest draw for me, but I don’t sense any more depth to the plot besides Peter’s brush with the dark side. Hopefully I’m wrong. Spiderman seems to be the only Marvel franchise able to keep up with DC’s Superman and Batman movies in terms of longevity. But before we speculate, let’s see if it can run the third lap successfully.