| Sam Raimi’s charming, if patchy, 2002 adventure showed that mass audiences were eager for a new kind of superhero and the industry never looked back It seems positively absurd to say this now, but in the summer of 2002, Spider-Man reached cinema audiences as a relative novelty. The superhero genre wasn’t dormant, though neither was it all-consuming. The goth-kitsch Batman cycle of the 1990s had petered out at that point, but successful adaptations of Blade and X-Men had resurrected Marvel Comics as viable cinematic fodder after direct-to-video stabs at Captain America and The Punisher. Blade, however, was an R-rated gorefest aiming for cultish endurance; X-Men, while a notch more accessible to younger viewers, was still a dark-ish, dour-ish affair intended first to please comic book loyalists. Swinging on to screens 20 years ago today, Spider-Man was different: a bright, goofy, youthful adventure with a wholesomeness that the genre hadn’t seen since the Christopher Reeve-starring Superman films two decades before. Continue reading... |
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