It seems utterly absurd to say this now, but in the summer of 2002 Spider-Man hit cinema audiences as a relative novelty. The superhero genre did not rest, although neither did it consume everything. The gothic-kitsch Batman cycle of the 1990s had fizzled by this point, but successful adaptations of Blade and X-Men had revived Marvel Comics as viable cinematic fodder after direct-to-video stitches on Captain America and The Punisher took place.
However, Blade was an R-rated gorefest aimed at cult endurance; While a little more accessible to younger viewers, X-Men was still a gritty, grumpy affair that should delight comic book loyalists first. When Spider-Man hit screens 20 years ago today, it was different: a bright, goofy, youthful adventure with a sanctity not seen in the genre since the Superman films starring Christopher Reeve two decades earlier.
Geeky devotees of the then 40-year-old comic boy hero would be pleased with director Sam Raimi’s lively origin story, but they weren’t necessarily his main audience. Using the framework of an earlier screenplay by an uncredited James Cameron, David Koepp’s screenplay positioned young Peter Parker’s story first as a romantic teenage coming-of-age and then as a Spandex Wars fantasy – thereby capturing viewers’ attention, who might take at face value a film about a boy dressed in red who spins webs and fights crime across New York.
It worked and has cost over $825 million worldwide. As Spider-Man stayed and stayed in theaters this season, it brought families and the date-night crowd to the web alongside the nerds. “It could restore the good name of film escapism,” said Rolling Stone’s Peter Travers amid a spate of unexpectedly strong reviews for Raimi’s film. Travers, who is particularly prone to exaggeration, may for once have been guilty of understatement: even in the immediate glory of the film’s popularity, few could have guessed how drastically Spider-Man would redefine the model of populist cinema. Two reboots, seven more Spidey films, and an entire entangled cinematic universe later, the film’s frisky underdog demeanor now feels like the sort of scrappy Trojan horse through which Marvel has driven its hegemonic plans for multiplex domination.
As a sophomore at university with a rather snotty attitude toward comics culture as a whole, I was among the many who were surprisingly entranced by Raimi’s vision: the film felt honestly dodgy and good-natured in a way that many of the assembly-line blockbusters like this one Sommers (including totally business-like re-imaginings of the Star Wars, Men in Black, Jack Ryan, and Mummy franchises) don’t. However its on-with-the-little-guy sentiment was generated, it was hard not to like a film that featured Tobey Maguire — then the branchy, slightly haunted-looking nerd of films like The Ice Storm, Pleasantville and The Cider House Rules – a chance to play an action hero that got him partially unmasked, not for a crucial action but for a passed out kiss in the rain, briefly interrupting a key sequence of digitized urban carnage to capture the lanky, broad-haired R&B eccentric Macy Gray belts out a few bars of a track titled My Nutmeg Phantasy.
So if Spider-Man works pretty well as an insider film for outsiders, that’s largely due to Raimi’s shaggy B-movie sensibility. A child prodigy who made his name with the grisly, scathingly funny “Evil Dead” movies tried his hand at his own stylish superhero original (too little commercial interest) with “Darkman” and spent the ’90s flitting between genres Moving into adult movies like The Quick and the Dead and A Simple Plan, he wasn’t an obvious captain for a four-quadrant studio behemoth with a six-figure budget. Everyone from chic stylist David Fincher to Batman savior Tim Burton to family film dealer Chris Columbus (who launched the Harry Potter franchise instead) was considered before Columbia Pictures chair Amy Pascal accepted Raimi’s candid comic nerd enthusiasm at stake – a virtue reflected in the film’s genius sympathy for misfits, as well as a cheeky, high-key aesthetic that aims to evoke the stylized panels of the original comics at every turn .
It was also Raimi who lobbied for the unexpected casting of Maguire as Peter Parker, rather than the studio’s penchant for handsomer teen idol types – Jude Law and James Franco (who ended up being cast as Parker’s self-pitying enemy Harry Osborn) among them . It was a coup that not only saved the film, but perhaps Marvel’s entire long-term agenda. Watching the film again today, it’s Maguire’s cute, quirky boy-man quality – and his gentle chemistry with Kirsten Dunst, cast against the studio’s expectations in much the same way as his feisty-sad Mary Jane – that does it Proceedings through some pretty tricky spots in Koepp’s script, most problematic of which is a villain who just doesn’t have the goods. Even in 2002, despite Willem Dafoe’s most lascivious efforts, the Green Goblin seemed stiffly visualized and awkwardly motivated; It was the rare superhero film where the pyrotechnic action kept popping up as a distraction from a more compelling relationship story.
Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst. Photo: ReutersRaimi and his team ironed out those issues in 2004’s Spider-Man 2, an overall slimmer, sharper affair that continued the first film’s endearing character work while switching in a richer, funnier villain in Alfred Molina’s Doctor Octopus, and for a… more ambitious visual majesty shot – with smoother, less cheesy effects that work to boot. It remains the high-water mark of the expanded Spider-Man universe: Raimi’s ill-advised second sequel hasn’t kept up, nor have any of the subsequent reboot phases, with Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland both being broadly appealing but bearing little from Maguire’s poignant clumsiness.
Twenty years later, the character of Spider-Man has become a key feature in something far less intimate and ingratiating than Raimi’s comparatively modest 2002 blockbuster. With Holland’s role woven into Marvel’s tangled web of Avengers spin-offs, new individual Spider-Man films have little time for the comfortably mundane everyday concerns of early-millennium Peter Parker. There isn’t just one city to save – a priority given in a film set months after 9/11 has an entire multiverse in need of maintenance.
When Maguire’s Spider-Man returned in last year’s gnarly Spider-Man: No Way Home, the oddity of his take on the character (down to his organic, wrist-based web-spinning abilities) was always a more exciting body-horror development than an outlandish one suit) was joke fodder for subsequent generations. Everything has changed, albeit staying somewhat the same: even Raimi has been brought back into the Marvel family, directing the latest appearance of Spidey’s MCU colleague Doctor Strange, which hits theaters this week. In 2002, the filmmaker was under pressure to revive a dormant comic book world; 20 years later, all he has to do is keep the machine running.