Sick of Recent Hollywoods Reboots? Blame Spider-Man

Remakes are nothing new in Hollywood, they've been remaking their crap for a long time now. Even Alfred Hitchcock remade his own film, The Man Who Knew Too Much. While many of these remakes were just cashing in on the name, others surpassed their predecessors. Probably one of the most universally hailed of the remakes is John Carpenter's The Thing, which very existence justifies the re-imagining of movies. But what Hollywood is doing more of lately, and successfully, is rebooting whole franchises. Take the James Bond (007) franchise, after years of evolving into self parody, the owners decided that they'd take him back to his darker and more grounded roots. The Batman franchise did the same thing; after the piece of garbage known as Batman & Robin, Warner Brothers decided that a reboot was needed. What we got out of it were two of the best superhero movies ever made.

On television, Battlestar Galactica went from its corny beginnings to a darker more serious show. It surpassed the original series in every respect, thanks to it's new atmosphere. Now horror movies such as, Halloween, Friday the 13th and soon Nightmare on Elm Street are all getting rebooted with a darker and more mature direction.

Look at the success of Transformers, it was updating the show for an older audience, making it seem more violent and less kid-friendly. Compare that to the failure of Dragonball: Evolution, which didn't target the adults that grew up with the show, but the kids who had not yet seen it.

Judging by the profit these movies are bringing in, most the movie going public seems to be like me, we're all open to seeing a good reboot, but we're starting to feel overwhelmed by them. So I tried to think back to the source of all these reboots. Besides Dracula and other characters that had entered public domain, there just weren't that many of them.*

It was only in the last decade where we were getting sequels to the remakes. I was beginning to wonder why this was. Did our culture have some sort of collective psyche in which we needed to see nostalgic material updated for our lives. Was it some desperate attempt to capture our youth and make older things grow with us? Well, no. I immediately suspended interest in these theories once I saw the first successful reboot of the new millennium...

ULTIMATE SPIDER-MAN, of course. First appearing in they year 2000, Ultimate Spider-man, was a book which retold Spider-man's beginnings, that was written by Michael Bendis and drawn by Mark Bagley.

During the late 90's, Marvel was losing readers and sales. It's continuity was becoming too complex, the storylines were dropping in quality and it was increasingly difficult to get new readers to come onboard. Lack of trade paperbacks at the time, and the collectors prices of old issues made it nearly impossible for newcomers to know what was going on. Marvel needed to either start from a new beginning, or make it cheaper to read old issues. What it did was both, but for the sake of this article, we'll look at the new beginning.

Ultimate Spider-man started out with a six issue story arc that set up many trends which reboots now use, among them are:

The Extended Origin:

Since almost everyone in America knows Spider-man's origin, more time is spent focussing on Peter Parker (Spidey's alter ego) before he gets his powers. His uncle Ben is written in as a mentor and not just a plot device. We establish some of the villains in his world and add the more popular characters earlier in his career. It adds a lot more psychological dimensions to the characters before the main story takes place. Something that Galactica, Batman, and Halloween are now playing off of. The learning curve of the main character is now more believable and relatable. This extra time spent with the origins means that the sequels can get right to the point and not recap everything for the uninitiated. (As done by the Dark Knight, and hopefully others in the near future.)


Further Grounding the Story in Reality:

While Spider-man isn't the most realistic superhero, besides his main villains, his story is more down to Earth. Gone are the aliens, the old guys who can make a flight device with no help or budget. Peter's interactions with other teenagers are much more believable than his 1960's version. He gets a job at the newspaper as a website moderator, not a photographer. This more realistic approach to characters is being done with the new Batman movies, Halloween and Friday the 13th flicks


Weakening the Main Character:

In this version, Spider-man isn't a genius, he took the formula of how to make webs from his father. He's careless with his identity and more people have figured out who he is. His mistakes are not as big as the ones Stan Lee's version made, but they consequences are more immediate and costlier. He simply has to try harder to get anything done, and as a result, he comes across as more relatable. Something all the reboots have their characters doing.


Picking and Choosing:

One of the benefits of reboots is picking and choosing what works from the past incarnation(s). If a character is outdated or stupid, major changes can be made to them, or they can be erased from existence all together. As many or few nods can be given to the past work as wanted. In Ultimate Spider-man, they completely ignore all the B-list villains and give the main ones more to do. They intertwine Spider-man's enemies with his origins, leaving the characters more fleshed out and the series tighter as a whole. This is something that every successful reboot has managed to do.


Making Changes:

This is the riskiest part of remakes, changes can make people all agree that the alteration was awesome (like the Elves showing up a Helm's Deep in LOTR: The Two Towers, or Ras A Gul's identity in Batman: Begins) or they can be hated, like the Super Bastard in Superman: Returns.** Spider-man not only made changes to his origin (leaving out the radioactive part) but also changed around his love interest. Mary Jane is now the sweet studying girl, and Gwen Stacy (introduced in the third arc,) is the party hard, knife wielding psychopath. Very different interpretations from their original creations. This leads to new storytelling possibilities, and adds a sense of danger and unpredictability that people who know the franchises felt were long since missing. Look at what the new Star Trek movie did with a similar theme.


Overall:

So why look at all these techniques in Ultimate Spider-Man if every reboot is doing them? Because Ultimate Spider-man, was probably the first successful reboot of a famous, but failing franchise that rejuvenated itself. It was a best seller on the comic market, it spawned spinoffs in the same rebooted universe, and if my theory is right, had its formula imitated constantly by Hollywood.

But why look at it now? Because a series called Ultimatum has destroyed a lot of what Ultimate Spider-man helped create. While fans were disappointed, there was no huge outcry over this. Many of the other rebooted spinoffs have ceased to exist completely, not because they were bad, but because after a while, people got sick of seeing the same stories retold over and over with very little knew ideas being brought into them. Well, that and the fact that Marvel's mainstream (616) titles got their act together and made it easier for people to start reading them again.

Why bring this up? Because if Ultimate Spider-Man really did help start the trend of movie reboots, then Hollywood should learn from it and start making more (quality) original movies and franchises, and make remakes (and reboots) obsolete before everyone gets sick of them and they start to lose money.

I figure, if Ultimate Spider-Man helped save comics, he might as well help save the movies too.***


-Mike M.

*If you really wanted to, you could count James Bond films as a reboot every time they changed actors.
**I'll leave it up to the reader to decide if this is a sequel or a remake.
***And yes, for the record, I know that Marvel's Ultimate line of comics wasn't the first major reboot in the industry. DC rebooted almost all it's titles in the mid-1980's. Even though many of the same techniques were used, they were rarely used all in one spot, and we weren't flooded with movie reboots back then.


Spider-man and related characters are the property of Marvel Comics.