In the last thirteen years, we’ve had two Spider-Man franchises that have delivered two versions of Peter Parker, eight villains, three variations on the Green Goblin and Hobgoblin characters, and five films in total. Next year, we’ll be introduced to our third friendly neighborhood wall-crawler – played by young actor Tom Holland – who will then go forth and star in his own newly-rebooted franchise in 2017.
Needless to say, Sony needs to find a way to differentiate this new franchise with Spideys past and prove that the third time really is the charm. This time around, up-and-coming director Jon Watts will be in the driver’s seat and he’ll have the support of Marvel Studios thanks to a new partnership deal between the two studios.
Marvel head Kevin Feige – who’s overseen every aspect of the highly successful Marvel Cinematic Universe – will have a heavy hand in shepharding the franchise forward and recently revealed a few of the things that we can expect to see from this new reboot.
Speaking with Birth Movies Death at the Ant-Man press junket, Feige talked a bit about bringing the classic soap opera stories back into Peter Parker’s life, introducing new villains and his biggest inspiration: John Hughes.
That’s right, that John Hughes. Feige is looking back at the Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off director’s body of work for inspiration on how to tackle Tom Holland’s Spider-Man, and it all goes back to the soap opera quality of the character that’s long been present in the source material but has yet to truly make the transition to the big screen:
“It’s the soap opera in high school, and those supporting characters, that are interesting. Just as we hadn’t seen a heist movie in a long time, or a shrinking movie in a long time, we haven’t seen a John Hughes movie in a long time. Not that we can make a John Hughes movie – only John Hughes could – but we’re inspired by him, and merging that with the superhero genre in a way we haven’t done before excites us.”
Marvel has taken the genre-blending approach to many of its Phase Two films, with pretty successful results. Iron Man 3 felt very much like a buddy cop film, while Captain America: The Winter Soldier was in the same vein as 1970’s political thrillers. Guardians of the Galaxy was a mix of superhero tale and space opera, while Ant-Man promises to be a blend of comic book antics and heist cinema. Applying the same approach to the high school-bound Peter Parker and injecting a bit of classic John Hughes sensibilities into the franchise could lead to a pretty entertaining film, not to mention the most faithful adaptation of the web slinger we’ve seen yet.
