Spidey news…

Call me cynical, call me tired, but I just can’t get all that excited over the “new” casting of Tom Holland for the role of Peter Parker/Spider-Man in film…

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/23/tom-holland-spider-man_n_7646812.html

If there’s a superhero franchise that is in real danger of being over-exposed, I believe it to be this one.  In very short order we had three films with Tobey Maguire (all of which were hugely financially successful though most audiences panned the third and last film in that series) followed by a re-booting and two films with Andrew Garfield (unfortunately for him and the people behind that two-film set, the second film soured Sony on continueing down that particular pathway).

So now we have a new Spider-Man, one that will somehow cross-over into the Avengers movie while remaining at Sony.

Ho hum.

Don’t get me wrong, there was a time I would have killed to see a high budget Spider-Man film on the screen.  But once it finally happened with Tobey Maguire, I found myself curiously unimpressed with the whole venture.  Many site his second Spider-Man film to be one of the all time best super-hero films ever made but for some reason it didn’t grab me like so many others and I wound up thinking it was at best only an “ok” feature.  And this is coming from a big fan of director Sam Raimi (absolutely love the Evil Dead series!)!!

As for the Garfield iteration, I suspect the lingering bad feelings I had with the Raimi/Maguire Spider-Man films turned me off of the whole re-booting concept.  While I applauded the return of the mechanical web shooters (I really didn’t like the Maguire/Raimi concept of “organic” webshooters), seeing yet again a Spider-Man origin story and a new set of “first adventures” of the character felt more like a chore than entertainment.

Before you think my feelings only extend to Spider-Man, know that I had very similar feelings when I finally got to see Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns, a film that some critics sang high praises to but for me was a colossal bore…an almost scene for scene/theme for theme remake of Richard Donner’s original Superman but without any of the sense of wonder or fun.

There always exists the danger that audiences might have their “fill” of the superhero genre and this big tent pole features and their equally big investment dollars may finally reach their critical mass.

The superhero genre has had something of a charmed life in recent years despite some bumps in the road, but a couple more “terrible” (in the eyes of audiences) superhero films might just tire audiences of these features and we may *gasp* one day have a summer without a single superhero film.

I know, I know, this is heretic talk, but there you have it.

As with so many things…we’ll see!