'Amazing Spider-Man' tries a quick franchise reboot

'Amazing Spider-Man' tries a quick franchise reboot

He's back. A little taller, a little better with a skateboard and the girls, but with the same goal he had when he last descended on theaters five years ago: to employ those sticky fingers at the box office.

Whether the web-slinger remains a commercial superhero gets tested Tuesday when The Amazing Spider-Man, one of the fastest franchise reboots on record, opens on more than 4,000 screens, including 3-D and IMAX.

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Along with Battleship, the movie marks one of the industry's riskier summer wagers. The $200 million film, starring a relative newcomer in Andrew Garfield, comes on the not-so-distant heels of Spider-Man 3, which snatched $337 million in 2007.

Few analysts expect the latest incarnation to match any entry in the Sam Raimi trilogy, which starred Tobey Maguire as the title character and averaged $371 million per film.

But for new director Marc Webb and distributor Sony Pictures, this Spidey doesn't need to reach the stratosphere. A reboot doesn't have to produce huge numbers, just enough dough to get a franchise aloft with new stars and filmmakers. Oh, and don't tick off the fanboys, who can be brutal on reboots.

Reboots That Worked

• The Original: Batman (1989)
• The Reboot: Batman Begins (2005)
• The Reception: Christopher Nolan resuscitated the franchise with his dark take on the Dark Knight. Begins would capture $205 million, followed by The Dark Knight’s $533 million in 2008. His final installment, The Dark Knight Rises, arrives July 20.


• The Original: Planet of the Apes (1968)
• The Reboot: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)
• The Reception: Fans and critics didn’t expect much from the franchise, which tried to restart with Tim Burton’s 2001 Planet of the Apes and did $180 million. But it was ravaged by fans and critics. Though it earned less than Burton’s version ($177 million), Rise earned wide plaudits and a sequel, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, due May 23, 2014.


• The Original: Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
• The Reboot: Star Trek (2009)
• The Reception: The USS Enterprise has always been fertile ground for films, having sent 10 pictures where no man has gone before. But J.J. Abrams’ version did $258 million, more than twice any other entry, and secured an as-yet-unnamed sequel, due next spring.

"I have great respect for what Sam did," says Webb, whose only other feature was the 2009 romantic comedy (500) Days of Summer. "But there are 50 years of (Spider-Man) comic books. There are a lot of story elem ents we haven't seen."

Reboots can be tricky, particularly for comic-book heroes. For every success like Batman, which got a makeover eight years after the 1997 debacle Batman Robin, there's a Hulk, who tried to launch himself to franchise status twice, in 2003 and 2008. Still, Hulk flop.

While analysts don't track reboot speeds, five years "is unusually fast," says Paul Dergarabedian of Hollywood.com. "But honestly, if it's a good movie, the audience really doesn't care what you call it."

And for the record, producers say, they didn't want a reboot. They wanted a sequel.

"We tried really hard to make a fourth movie with Sam (Raimi)," says producer Matt Tolmach. "In his elegant way, he put up his hand and said, 'I'm done. I've told my story. Go tell your story.' There's no one time period or generation that owns iconic characters. They're timeless. There are other Spider-Man stories to be told."

This version hews a little closer to its literary roots: namely, the disappearance of Peter Parker's parents, a plot twist in the comic books that went unexplored in Raimi's films.

"We felt we had a story that didn't fit into the first trilogy," says Avi Arad, who produced the original Spider-Man movies and this restart.

Arad says he doesn't get the fuss over the quick turnaround.

Reboots That Stumbled

• The Original: Superman (1978)
• The Reboot: Superman Returns (2006)
• The Reception: Like Burton’s Planet of the Apes, Returns scored a sizable box-office haul at $201 million. But reception was so negative that Warner Bros. didn’t pursue a sequel. The studio tries again with Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel, out June 14, 2013.


• The Original: Hulk (2003)
• The Reboot: The Incredible Hulk (2008)
• The Reception: Audiences didn’t care much for Eric Bana’s original green guy, who collected $132 million, or Ed Norton’s rendition, which managed $135 million. His best reception came as a character (played by Mark Ruffalo) in The Avengers, which became the third-highest-grossing film of all time this summer with $606 million so far.


• The Original: A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)
• The Reboot: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
• The Reception: While the redo of Wes Craven’s classic did a respectable $63 million, it wasn’t enough return on the film’s $35 million budget. No new installments of the Freddy Krueger story have been announced.

"Look at James Bondâ€" virtually every movie is a reboot," he says. "That's not a bad thing if you have a fundamentally good story. You can have two chefs make cheesecake. They're going to taste different, but they can still be delicious ."

One of Webb's priorities: to make his hero look different, particularly in flight. Most of the film's early stunts, he says, were done with harnesses and wires instead of computers. Webb took footage of Garfield soaring on cables to "capture the laws of physics acting on the human body." He superimposed the clips on computer-generated backgrounds.

"I wanted the action to be more realistic" than in the earlier films, he says. "Something I told the studio from the beginning was, I wanted this story to have gravity â€" physically and emotionally."

Webb, who as a kid worshiped at the comic-book store three blocks from his Madison, Wis., home, was so determined to find a physically gifted star that he asked auditioning actors to run sprints, just to see how fast and smoothly they moved.

"We're in an era where you can accomplish anything with a computer," he says. "I wanted t o put a limitation on that. Audiences recognize that tone. It makes the action more realistic."

So far, audiences favor the makeover. Early reviews are strong, and the movie did a healthy $50.2 million in 13 countries this weekend.

"This thing is going to be a beast overseas," says Jeff Bock, box-office analyst for Exhibitor Relations. "But Hollywood will be watching it closely here to see how quickly you can reboot a franchise."

Webb concedes that Spidey needs to maintain his swoop to win over fanboys and extend the superhero's cinematic life expectancy. The key, he says: connecting the audience with the hero through "emotion that's more grounded" than in the original films.

But don't take Spidey's mood swings personally, Webb says to Raimi supporters.

"I've always been a Spider-Man fan and had specific opinions about Peter Parker," Webb says. "I always envisioned him with a slightly different inflection. I always saw Peter Parker as an orphan, even with a father figure like Uncle Ben. Anyone left behind by their parents is going to face severe emotional consequences. I wanted to explore that."

Webb and the filmmakers know that the brisk redo will invite comparisons to the first three movies, which remain the second-highest-grossing superhero franchise of all time, behind only Batman's $1.45 billion â€" and that's over six films.

"It's human nature to compare this movie" with its predecessors, Arad says. "That's fine, as long as people give it a chance to see it's a story we've told in a completely different way."